14 DAY TRIAL // It took longer than usual, but Chrome 22 was finally shoved into the beta channel. Chrome 22 sure did enjoy its time in the dev channel and took its sweet time moving up.
You'd be forgiven to think, then, that Chrome 22 must come with some ground-shaking new features, but, no, not really. There's plenty of stuff to like, but nothing out of the ordinary.
In fact, the only thing Google thought was worthy of even mentioning is that the Chrome 22 beta comes with the Pointer Lock API for JavaScript, i.e. mouse lock.
The feature is aimed at games that need to be able to get a hold of the mouse completely, that would be first-person games.
It's a big feature for HTML5 gaming and complements nicely the Gamepad API, Chrome 21 introduced, but it's not going to mean much for most people and it's not going to mean much for gamers either since games to take advantage of all these new features are far and few between and even those are mostly tech demos.
But that's not all Chrome 22 brings, you'll also notice the brand new "hot dog" menu icon that replaces the wrench icon.
The wrench icon has been around since the first Chrome beta four years ago, but Google apparently decide it needed an update and replaced it with a menu icon reminiscent of the one used in Android.
It makes some sense to have Chrome for Android and the desktop Chrome look more similar and the new icon isn't ugly or unintuitive. But people are still going to hate it. For five minutes, until they get used to it.
Also new in Chrome 22 is the ability to set custom keyboard shortcuts for extensions. This has the potential to get really interesting, since there's an API for extensions to access the feature, but for now it's not really that powerful.