Google starts rolling out Chrome 74 for Android, brings feature to reduce motion sickness

Google has started to roll out Chrome 74 for Android bringing a slew of new features, including the ability to “Remove animations” to help with motion sickness. Chrome version 74 also brings Sync and Google services to mobile, and deprecates “drive-by downloads in sandboxed iframes". Google says that this is a phased roll out and "it'll become available on Google Play over the next few weeks."

Remove Animations

The Chrome 74 update brings an option to “remove animations”. The developers will now have to support the feature to limit motion sickness by turning off animations, like parallax scrolling, zooming, and other motion effects, as well as and enable a faster browsing experience in general. "While many users enjoy such animations, some users dislike them because they feel distracted or slowed down from them. In the worst case, users may even suffer from motion sickness as if it were a real life experience, so for these users reducing animations is a medical necessity," a developer said in a Google Blog.

Translate

Google Chrome 74 for Android is also making it easier for users to translate pages. "Translate any web page instantly by selecting Translate from the menu," the changelog reads on the official Google blog. 

Sync and Google Services

The “Sync and Google services” menu will now be availble on Chrome for Android. This section has all options related to data collected by Google in the browser. Previosuly, it was under “Privacy” menu, but now it can be found under "Settings."

Data Saver is now Lite Mode

The version 74 renames Data Saver as Lite Mode. Google says that the pages will load faster in Chrome 74, in some cases considerably faster, and use less memory. “Lite mode will continue to reduce data use by using Google servers to compress the pages you visit before downloading them. The Lite mode tells web servers that you are interested in receiving a version of the site that uses less data if one is available. Since we introduced Data Saver in Chrome, we’ve reduced users’ data usage by up to 60 percent,” Google has said. The company also says that if Chrome predicts that a page will take longer than five seconds for the first text or image to show on screen, it will load a Lite version of the page instead.

Sharing and editing URLS

The ability to quickly share and edit URLs was introduced in the previous release and now the functionality is rolled out to the mobile. Users can tap on the Omnibar, and the URL of the site will have buttons to their right that will let them edit and/or share the link.

The latest release will also let the browser “prevent downloads in sandboxed iframes that lack a user gesture.”  Although, this restriction could be lifted via an 'allow-downloads-without-user-activation' keyword in the sandbox attribute list. This feature allows content providers to restrict malicious or abusive downloads.

Further, Chrome 74 has also implemented 39 security fixes that were found by external researchers. Chrome has over 1 billion users, and according to StatCounter, Chrome had 62.58 percent of global market share in March 2019.

from Latest Technology News http://bit.ly/2L4FL5d