Tip Us

Android Police
Prev
Posts in the last
24 Hours
sorted by
Hottest
Next
Articles Tagged:

chrome beta

183

Chrome Beta Updated To v51 With Material Bookmarks Widget And No More Merged Tabs Option

Ryan Whitwam

The march of Chrome updates never ends, and now is the time for the beta build to advance. Google is rolling out Chrome Beta v51 on Android. Since we've already seen v51 in the dev channel, we know what to look for—and yep, the merged tabs/apps option is indeed gone. So, that wasn't a fluke.

Read More
58

Physical Web Support Comes To Chrome 49 Beta For Android

Bertel King, Jr.

When you come across a QR code, the experience isn't exactly seamless. You tap your barcode scanner, aim at the funny looking blocks, then watch a link open up in your browser. Then you're either looking at a website or downloading an app.

Read More
23

[APK Download] Chrome Beta 46 Now Available In Google Play, Brings Several Developer-ey Tweaks

Cameron Summerson

Chrome Beta seems to be that sweet spot between reliability and new features - not quite as bleeding edge as the Dev build, but still packed with new stuff earlier than the Stable build. It's generally my personal favorite browser to use as primary, because checking out the new stuff once it's basically no longer buggy is always fun.

Beta 46 was announced for Android yesterday, and it brings a slew of under-the-hood improvements. Even more than that, it brings a ton of features for developers that I'm not even going to pretend to fully understand; if you're the type who likes to dig into code, however, you may want to check out the Chromium blog for more info.

Read More
32

Chrome Beta And Chrome Dev Get The New Icon-Focused 'New Tab' Layout On Lollipop And Later

Michael Crider

Want to see something new in Chrome for Android? Aside from essentially unlimited websites, of course. If so, and if you're using Android 5.0, 5.1, or the 6.0 preview, then download either the Beta or Dev version of the browser. Then go into the Settings menu and disable "merge tabs and apps." Now, go back to the main browser window, open the hamburger menu, and tap "new tab." Wey-hey, you've got a new interface to check out.

2015-08-23 19.26.56 2015-08-23 19.27.37 2015-08-23 19.26.32

Left: new tab in Chrome. Right: new tab in Chrome Beta/Dev after disabling merged tabs.

The new standard swaps out the frequently-visited website thumbnails you're probably familiar with for icons, which are simply letters with some fancy background formatting.

Read More

Popular

98
Google’s first Pixel feature drop boosts performance, updates Photos, Call Screen, Duo (Update: Quarterly releases planned)
70
Spotify is gifting more Google Home Minis, this time to all subscribers (Update: Offer is back, students eligible too)
8
Netflix might expand mobile-only plan to more markets outside of India (Update: Indonesia)
252
Google Stadia review: This could be big (Update: Three weeks later)
25

Chrome Beta v45 Comes With Support For Media Playback System Notifications, Lots Of Under The Hood Changes

Jacob Long

The latest release of Chrome Beta doesn't include many big, user-facing changes, but is instead mostly filled with incremental improvements to long-term development goals. The one goodie for end users that you may notice in normal use is the newly-added ability for websites to give you an Android notification with play and pause buttons to control audio.

For websites using up-to-date APIs, audio and video that is over 5 seconds long will result in a notification being displayed for easier control. I think of this somewhat similarly to the desktop version's indicator for noisy tabs.

Read More
40

Chrome Beta v44 Comes With Improvements To 'Native App' And 'Add To Homescreen' Banners, New Push API Features, And More [APK Download]

Cody Toombs

This month's update to Chrome is a little more developer-centric than usual. We're accustomed to seeing small visual tweaks and a couple of other new capabilities here and there –and there is a fix of that nature– but this time, it's all about the APIs. Chrome Beta v44 adds a few new features for notifications and install banners, adds a new way to define names for object literals in Javascript, and makes a few breaking changes to the Push API.

What's New

Fix for multi-column layouts

From a user-facing standpoint, the only directly relatable change came to multi-column layouts in Chrome.

Read More
88

[Update: New Audio And Video Playback Features] Chrome 43 Beta Adds Faster Checkout With Google Wallet Data And Colored Grey Status Bar [APK Download]

Rita El Khoury

The Chrome blog has announced that version 43.0.2357.38 of the browser is being released to the beta channel on the Play Store. This update introduces the usual panoply of bug fixes and performance improvements — which seem to be quite effective this time around — along with a new feature. When purchasing an item, the process of filling checkout forms should be more streamlined and secure thanks to data from Google Wallet.

chrome-beta-23

Another visual change has been implemented in this version as well. Previously, when you had your Chrome tabs merged with Recents, the status bar would take the header color specified by the site (for example, it's blue on Android Police, orange on APK Mirror), but other sites would keep a black bar.

Read More
15

Chrome v43 Beta Releases With MIDI Keyboard Support, Smarter Permission Prompts, And Automatic Copy/Cut Without Flash

Jacob Long

It's that time again when Chrome's beta channel updates to give those of us who can't wait for the fun stuff a chance to test things out in a pretty stable environment. The latest iteration, v43, isn't exactly groundbreaking but ships several meaningful changes.

The addition of an API for MIDI devices, like keyboards, probably doesn't affect too many people. Those who will benefit, though, will do so quite a bit. I'm not aware of any web apps that would function for a good working example, but the API added in v43 will allow connected MIDI devices to input as they would with a desktop program.

Read More
23

Chrome Beta v42 Includes New Prompt For Adding Web Apps To Your Home Screen

Jacob Long

Along with site notifications, the latest Chrome Beta v42 has another new feature for improving the web app experience. The ability to add a website to your home screen from Chrome has been there for a while now, but not all web pages are created equal in this regard. These shortcuts work best for fully-fledged web apps and now Chrome will let you know when you have visited a good candidate for home screen placement.

To get an idea of how it works, check out this GIF from HTML5 Rocks:

add-to-home-screen-9f848df296e9e17100d68ef9aea43d69

Perhaps the most important aspect of this feature is that it will not appear every time you visit a qualifying site.

Read More
41

[Update: Notifications Working!] Chrome Beta Bumped To Version 42 With 'Site Notifications' And Not Much Else [APK Download]

Michael Crider

Hey Google, I know that this is a beta release of Chrome for Android, but a little explanation on your update page would be very helpful. For example, what exactly are site notifications, as alluded to with the text "get the latest updates from sites with notifications?" Presumably they'll show up in Chrome Beta 42 when initiated by a website, but will that be when you're on that particular page, when you're using Chrome, or will the notification be presented in Android's notification bar?

Read More

What's Hot