Google has released a new beta of its Chrome browser for the desktop and mobile. New in this release is a revamped user interface for HTML 5 date and time input forms, DevTools updates, the ability for Chrome Packaged Apps to use the Sync FileSystem API for offline storage, support for live audio input with the Web Audio API, and up to five percent faster content loading.
Google says that the five percent boost was implemented by being “more aggressive about using an idle connection and demoting the priority of preloaded resources so that they don’t interfere with critical assets.” Testing on the Windows Chrome Beta release saw no user-perceivable increase, but physical benchmarking did show a slight measurable gain of less than two percent. The Mac OS version of Chrome saw closer to a four percent gain, but also still imperceptible by the user.
