The most widely-employed browser for surfing the web, Chrome has today been upgraded to version 59. It is now rolling to desktop users across devices running Mac, Windows, or Linux and brings along some nifty developer features and security improvements to this new version of Google’s browser offering.
Chrome 59 provides you access to native macOS notifications, support for animated PNG format, and a Material Design settings page (finally!).
The Material redesign of the Chrome browser has been in the works for quite some time now. Google has been sticking to a phased roll out the rolling out of the user interface changes and has now reached the setting window, which gets the revamp today. Google, as expected has debuted a highlighted search bar at the very top and card-based controls clubbed together in this new interface.
The changes to the settings window are only cosmetic and no new control have been debuted with this update. It’s just that settings now come with a navigation drawer, which provides quick access to various categories within the settings window. The About page has also been redesigned with a Material touch in the Chrome 59 update.
Next, Google is known to have adopted its own notification system to make the users aware of the latest happenings on the website they presently aren’t browsing. Chrome 59 is, however, giving up on the said system to adopt the native macOS notification system to provide users with a seamless user experience. This means the notifications sent out by developers via the Notifications API will be displayed as the image attached underneath:
Chrome 59 also introduces a command line mode called Headless Chromium, which is super-minimal for running browser tests, as well as checking server details as you do not require to see the graphical rendered output. This updated browser will come in handy for Selenium users who’re testing out their progressive web app or inspecting a page with devtools.
Google is also adding support for Image Capture API, which enables vsites to directly gain access to higher resolution images clicked with the camera, in Chrome 59. Earlier, you had to switch between the camera and the browser to upload high-resolution photos but that’s a thing of the past as developers now have access to your camera settings, such as zoom, ISO, and white balance.
While Chrome 59 debuts several minor upgrades, another significant addition to the browser comes in the form of the Navigation Preload API. This enables the browser to pre-load navigation requests while a service worker is starting up, meaning the requests are started even before executing the fetch event handler — assigned the task of intercepting the target URL.
