Chrome 74 was released only a few days ago, which means v75 has moved up to the Beta Channel. This release doesn’t have any drastic changes, but it does continue to improve the dark theme, and there are some fancy new APIs that web apps can use.
Dark theme changes
Chrome 75 includes a few changes to the dark theme that first arrived in Chrome 74, though you still have to activate the #enable-android-night-mode flag to try it out. The settings menu for it has been changed from ‘Dark mode’ to ‘Themes,’ and you can now force light mode to be on at all times (even when the system itself is in dark mode).
Left: Chrome 74; Right: Chrome Beta 75
Furthermore, the main complaint about Chrome’s dark mode has been addressed — the text on tab titles is finally white, to match the gray background.
Left: Chrome 74; Right: Chrome Beta 75
It’s still not clear when dark mode will no longer require a flag, but Android Q is still a few months away from a final release.
The Web Share API was initially rolled out in Chrome 61, and allowed web pages to share text and URLs to native Android apps for the first time. However, web pages still can’t share file data (like images) using this functionality. Chrome 75 includes support for ‘Level 2’ of the Web Share API, which solves that problem.
A demo of the existing Web Share API
In a similar process to the existing Web Share API, apps can define a file (or list of files) to share. When a button in the app is clicked/tapped, the Android share dialog appears, just as it would for native applications. For example, an image gallery web app could add a button to share an image file to another app.
The only catch is that while web apps can now send files, they still cannot receive them from other web/native apps. That will come as part of the Level 2 Web Share Target API, which is currently scheduled to arrive in Chrome 76.
Other features
As always, Chrome 75 includes changes for both users and developers. Here are some smaller features included in this update:
- More options for web animations are available to developers, with improvements to the Web Animation API.
- Synchronous network requests when a page is being closed are now blocked.
- Web pages can now check if your device supports a given sample size, sample rate, latency, and channel count for audio playback.
- The new “overscroll” and “scrollend” events allow web pages to determine when content is being over-scrolled, or when scrolling has finished. This can help create batter pull-to-refresh animations, for example.
- Service Workers now appear in Chrome’s Task Manager.
- The Web Authentication API now supports PINs for “keys that implement the FIDO CTAP2 protocol.”
- A new feature is in development for freezing iframes (most embedded ads, videos, etc.) when the user scrolls past them.
- The canvas.getContext() method now supports a desynchronized hint, which could make web apps that rely on image or video processing a bit quicker.
Download
The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.
Note: Some versions of the Chrome APK use app bundles, which APKMirror doesn’t support yet. As a result, not all variations of the Chrome APK are available for direct download.
- Source:
- Chrome Platform Status,
- Google Developers