14 DAY TRIAL // On the first day of December, Gooogle decided that it was time for the popular Chrome web browser to get a new release, so it promoted Chrome 55 to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac, and Windows.
After playing it safe in the Beta channel since the 21st of October 2016, Chrome 55 is finally here with its unified input handling support by dispatching PointerEvents, which could lead to a more responsive web browsing as pages won't block scrolling by default. Additionally, passive event listeners can be used for TouchEvent on mobile devices.
"Chrome also now supports two new ways to respond to input. The touch-action CSS property enables sites to react to gestures such as panning. For mouse buttons, the new auxclick input event type allows sites to manage the click behavior of non-primary buttons," said Dan Ehrenberg, System Software Engineer, Chrome OS team.
Chrome now supports the async and await JavaScript keywords
Also new in Chrome 55 is support for the async and await JavaScript keywords, which might come in handy for web developers who want to write Promise-based JavaScript that can be as readable and structured as synchronous code. Another highly requested feature landed in Chrome 55 - support for CSS automatic hyphenation.
CSS hyphenation is used to improve the visual consistency of text blocks by allowing the Google Chrome web browser to hyphenate words when line-wrapping, but for now it's only supported on Android and macOS, and it's coming to Linux and Windows in future releases of Chrome.
Among other interesting features implemented in Chrome 55, we can mention that a download button is now displayed on media controls when the playback is associated with a downloadable file, an overflow menu is shown on the media player when not all buttons can be displayed, and websites can now use persistent storage in Chrome.
A total of 36 security issues were patched in this release, those making web browsing a lot safer when using Google Chrome. Check out the release announcement page for all the details, and, in the meantime, download Chrome 55.0.2883.75 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our website.