The next iteration of the most widely used internet browser has started rolling out to Windows, Mac and Linux users. Chrome 57 has today been launched with support for CSS Grid Layouts for better website designing, API improvements, and other security updates. There aren’t many significant changes in the desktop variant as opposed to Android or Chrome OS, this time around.
The most significant addition to Chrome 57 comes in the form of CSS Grid Layout functionality. This is aimed at helping developers in improving upon the overall responsive user interface. While Flexbox is a powerful tool and allows you to produce complex layouts but it works only in one-dimension.
But, Chrome 57 now features the new grid property which makes two-dimensional grid-based layouts possible. Elements within this grid can be spanned across multiple rows and columns and named to make code management easier. This also makes it simpler for developers to maintain responsiveness across different screen sizes.
In addition, this update also enables the Web Assembly API by default, allowing developers to run near-native code within the browser without any plugins. The Payment Request API, which allows you to securely integrate payment options on your website, is now being made available inside an iframe attribute as well. And all payment cards can now be referred to using a single method identifier ‘basic-card’. It also fixed 36+ vulnerabilities, shelling out close to $38,000 in bug bounties for this release. It has also added a new badge in the address bar which notifies when you are running a secure Chrome page or website.
Chrome is one of the most prominent web browsers, with a massive 1 billion active users. Thus, it has continually been expanding the scope of developer tools available on the platform with each new iteration. With Chrome 56, Google has now even baked support for WebVR in its browser, thus, making it easier for you to consume virtual reality content on the internet. This functionality has been in the works for the last six odd months. It has also made page reloads faster by almost 28 percent.
