Chrome 47 Beta Brings Cooperative Multitasking, Android Splash Screens And Flexible Desktop Notifications

Google released Chrome 47 for the beta channel with support for cooperative multitasking, splash screens for sites that are added to the home screen, and more flexible desktop notification management, as well as some security patches.

Cooperative Multitasking

Android had a problem with lag and stuttering for many years, which was mostly fixed in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and then further improved in future iterations. One of the main causes of the problem was the way in which Android handled the processing of different tasks. It would often try to do too much at the same time, which would overwhelm the CPU and GPU, and users would see dropped frames or slowdowns in their apps.

To fix the issue as well as achieve 60 frame per second animations in their apps, developers need to be proactive with how they optimize both their apps, as well as web apps. Starting with Chrome 47, web developers will be able to set work to run during idle time rather than when the user is interacting with the web app. This should guarantee that when low-priority work is active, it won't hurt the performance of the web application. This feature is available for both the mobile and the desktop versions of Chrome 47 beta.

Splash Screens For Android

Because mobile devices aren't as powerful as PCs (especially at lower price levels), it can sometimes take a few seconds for apps to load, which can frustrate users. Splash screens help alleviate that impatience a little, by showing users something a little more meaningful than a simple loading page.

If the developers enable this option, the app can first show a splash screen when their websites are launched from the Android home screen. They can customize the splash screen by setting a name, icon, background color, and notification bar color in the web app manifest. The splash screen will then appear immediately as Chrome loads in the background. When the web app begins to draw on the screen, the splash screen will disappear.

Flexible Notifications

Starting with Chrome 42, Google enabled push notifications in web applications, which can be used by social media apps, email web apps, and so on. However, such apps can also tend to send too many notifications at once, which hurts the user experience.

Now, developers can give users more options for what they can do with these notifications, such as keeping the notification onscreen until the user dismisses them, or allowing automatic dismissal of such notifications.

If you want to get this version of Chrome, you can get it from the beta channel. Otherwise, it usually takes around six weeks until the version is made final and released to the stable channel (which is what most Chrome users already have, so they will receive the update automatically).

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Lucian Armasu joined Tom’s Hardware in early 2014. He writes news stories on mobile, chipsets, security, privacy, and anything else that might be of interest to him from the technology world. Outside of Tom’s Hardware, he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.

You can follow him at @lucian_armasu. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.