Chrome 39 Beta brings new developer features

Google has released Google Chrome 39 Beta to the Beta channel with some major developer-oriented additions.

Web Animations support has been enhanced with a playback control. This supports methods like play(), pause(), and reverse(), as well as adding the ability to jump to a specific point in a timeline, greatly expanding its usefulness.

Chrome 39 now supports ECMAScript 6 Generators, special functions which create iterators that pause their execution after yielding a value, and resume again when they’re next invoked. All of which means they make life easier when developing asynchronous code, cutting down on design and debugging hassles.

There’s also early support for Web Manifests, a central file for storing metadata associated with a web application (name, display mode, orientation, opening URL, links to icons). A code sample is available now, but the specification is still just a draft so expect the low-level details to change soon.

Support for the Beacon API allows web pages to send data to a server without slowing down page navigation.

Finally, in another step towards high DPI support, scroll offsets (scrollTop, scrollLeft) now return high-precision fractional values.

Google Chrome 39 Beta is available now for Windows, Mac and Linux. The final release should be available in November, but of course if you need something stable then there’s always Chrome 38.