After launching the latest version, Chrome 55, on desktop across all platforms, Google has today started rolling out the update to Android users as well. This version of mobile Chrome brings along with it a new ‘Downloads’ feature that enables users to save web pages, music, and videos for offline viewing.
Talking about the downloads feature, the same has been tucked away neatly in the overflow menu i.e the three dots at the top-right of the browser. Using this download icon at the top of this overflow menu, the user can seamlessly download any web page along with text and images at the click of a button.
Whereas saving a video or audio for offline viewing is a little different and requires the user to tap the save icon appearing next to the scrubber. All the downloads will occur in the background, and won’t disrupt your workflow.
Now, the Chrome 55 user has downloaded the web pages and other files for viewing them at a later point in time. But how does one gain access to them?
Well, Google has added a new ‘Downloads’ tab in the overflow menu – we’re constantly talking about. Tap on the said option to open the chronological list of content – arranged according to download date. There is also a hamburger menu on the left, which enables the user to take a peek at all of the files under specific categories – all, pages, video, audio, images, documents and others. It also shows you how much storage has been used up. Users can also long press any offline content to delete or share the same.
In addition, Chrome 55 for Android introduces some minor improvements to the contextual search UI and now highlights misspelled words in text fields. It also introduces the improved V8 JavaScript engine to reduce memory usage of the browser. Chrome can now run smoothly on Android devices with RAM of 512 MB and under, thanks to heap size reduction and zone memory reduction techniques.
