Chrome 52 Beta includes many developer features to improve browser performance

With Chrome 51 rolled out to browsers, mobile, and Chromebooks, version 52 is now in the beta channel. The release adds many developer focused features that should improve the overall performance of the browser.

Chrome cuts down on loading and rendering times by using heuristics to determine what parts of a webpage have changed and only updating those. However, sometimes elements can display outside the bounds of its parents and effect elements elsewhere on the page. As a result, Chrome must consider rendering more elements than necessary.

In version 52 of Chrome, a new CSS contain property allows developers to prevent elements from displaying outside its bounds, thus allowing Chrome to ignore those elements and leading to faster render times.

In a continuing effort to improve push notifications on the web, Chrome 52 now supports an open standard to authenticate a site’s server with a push service called VAPID. Previously, developers had to use proprietary push messaging delivery services with different APIs for different browsers.

Other additions include a new PerformanceObserver API that allows for a simple way to collect analytics and giving service workers support for streaming. Small user facing tweaks include Chrome pausing animations when showing modal dialog boxes and preventing accidental pop-ups when scrolling by making sure a user tapped rather than just scrolled through an ad.

All these features apply to the latest Chrome Beta on all platforms. They should be available in the stable channel in approximately six weeks.