When Chrome was first released for Android almost a year ago, one of my complaints was its lack of support for chrome://flags and access to experimental settings. The day has finally come that this is now a feature of my favorite mobile browser, albeit in its beta form.

The updated browser – which just hit the Play Store a bit ago – brings that feature, and that feature alone. Once you've installed the update, just open a new tab and enter "chrome://flags" into the address bar to access some neat experimental features of the browser, just like on its desktop counterparts. Each option is clearly labeled to which platform it applies to, and only features accessible on Android can be enabled. Just a quick skim through the list revealed things like:

  • Override software rendering list
  • Disable accelerated 2D canvas
  • Disable deferred 2D canvas
  • Disable accelerated CSS animations
  • Composited render layer borders
  • FPS counter
  • GPU accelerated SVG filters
  • Enable WebGL
  • Disable Hyperlink Auditing
  • Show Autofill predictions
  • Enable tab favicon sync
  • Enable sync keystore encryption
  • HTTP Pipelining
  • Enable SPDY/3
  • Disable Media Source API on <video> Elements
  • Enable Experimental JavaScript
  • Disable better session restore
  • Disable 3D software rasterizer
  • Enable experimental WebKit features
  • Enable CSS shaders
  • Disable Website settings UI
  • Enable crashing on GPU hang
  • Enable performance monitoring
  • Enable new Autofill heuristics
  • Enable full history sync

That pretty much covers the bulk of the features that can be toggled in this new menu – but remember, these are all experimental settings. They're not ready for prime time just yet and could possibly cause system instability and things of that nature. If you're cool with that, grab the newest Chrome Beta and go crazy.