Chrome 39 Beta Delivers New Animation Features for Developers

Hot on the heels of the Chrome 38 Stable release for Windows, Mac and Linux, Google has released the beta version of Chrome 39 for testing purposes and early adopters.

The most current version of their popular web browser includes some nice features for developers to grapple with to improve what they can show on a web page in the future.

There is new web animation support without allows for enhanced playback controls. Controls like play, pause and even reverse play can be added easily and using the playback timeline it can be skipped to any point along the animation track. This makes the native animation support far greater than was present previously. Handy for animation sites.

Chrome 39 will support ECMAScript 6 Generators that help to add a pause between the calculation of a value and what comes next. This will help with debugging code due to being able to run code to see how it executes and then pausing it at any point in mid-flow to see how the parameters look at each stage along the way.

Meta data storage connecting to web applications is given more support with the use of Web Manifests.

The Beacon API is also supported for web pages which enables a web site to send a communication to a web server without the page navigation slowing down for the web browser user. This can also help with predictive browsing that pulls in future web pages before they are requested which was added with increased support on the Chrome 38 Stable release.

Higher resolution monitors also gained further support with higher DPI values with improved scrolling movement within the web browser.

Further specifics can be reviewed here.

The Google Chrome 39 Beta is available to be downloaded for Windows, Mac and Linux. Is it expected that the Stable release will arrive later in November. The current Google Chrome 38 is also accessible if you prefer to use that instead.