On 2nd September 2018 Google Chrome celebrated its 10th birthday. Google dressed up Chrome with a new look by launching Chrome 69. However, due to the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S. this year, it posted and updated about Chrome’s new look a few days later on 4th September 2018.
With more than 1 billion active users, Google Chrome has become the most-used and the most-loved platform for normal users as well as web developers. With Chrome’s new version releases that take place every six weeks, developers can stay on top of everything available, as well as all the features that have been deprecated or removed.
The release also includes powerful graphics, a more powerful Omnibox, an updated password manager, improvised autofill, and a lot of developer-specific and security improvements.
What’s new in Chrome 69?
A brand new UI for a seamless experience
Chrome’s 69’s look can now be seen across all platforms (desktop, Android, and iOS). Users will see more rounded shapes, new icons, and a new color palette.
For desktop, Google also changed the shape of its tabs making the web icons easily visible, thus resulting in an easier navigation across tabs. For mobile, Chrome 69 includes a number of changes for faster browsing. On iOS, the toolbar is moved to the bottom for an easy access. Across Chrome, Google has simplified the prompts, menus, and even the URLs in the user’s address bar.
A lightning fast experience
A lot of online activities such as booking travel tickets and appointments, shopping, and working through the to-do lists across multiple sites at once have been one of the features of Chrome. Following this, Google wants to make this experience a lot easier and safe in its new and updated Chrome 69. Now, Chrome can more accurately fill in user passwords, addresses, and credit card numbers, for an easy checkout through online forms. All this information is saved on user’s Google account, and can also be accessed directly from the Chrome toolbar.
Staying secure on the web means using strong and unique passwords for every different site. When it’s time to create a new password, Chrome will now generate one for the user. No more using pet names or birth dates, that can easily be cracked. Chrome will save the password, and next time the user signs in, it’ll be there, on both the laptop and phone.
Chrome 69 now with a smarter search bar
The Omnibox, which is placed on top of chrome, combines both the search bar and address bar into one. In this new Chrome version, Google has made Omnibox much faster, and much smarter. The Omnibox will now show the answers directly in the address bar without having to open a new tab—from rich results on public figures or sporting events, to instant answers like the local weather via weather.com or a translation of a foreign word.
The plus point of this Omnibox is if two dozen tabs open across three browser windows: Users can search for a website in the Omnibox and Chrome will tell if it’s already open and allows the user to jump straight to it with “Switch to tab.” Also, the users will also be able to search files from their Google Drive directly in their Omnibox too.
A personalized Chrome for everyone!
This new version can now be easily personalized as per user convenience. Users can now create and manage shortcuts to their favorite websites directly from the new tab page. All they have to do is, simply open a new tab and ‘Add shortcut’. They can also customize the background of a newly-opened tab with their favorite photograph.
Other plans by Google, for Chrome
Google has launched several other features for user privacy and safety including:
- an ad blocker to keep users safe from malicious and annoying ads.
- Moved the web to HTTPS to keep you secure online.
- Launched site isolation which provides deeper defense against many types of attacks including Spectre, and brought VR and AR browsing to Chrome.
Google further plans to roll out a set of new experiments to improve Chrome’s startup time, latency, usage of memory, and usability. A new CSS features to improve performance tracking ability has been rolled out just for Chrome’s developer community.
Here’s a short video explaining all the new features in the new Chrome 69.
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