Chrome Beta for Android now supports experimental flags
In Google’s continuing effort to align desktop and mobile versions of the Chrome web browser, the latest version of Chrome Beta for Android now supports the enabling of experimental flags. A standard feature of Chrome on Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as Chrome OS, experimental flags allow users to enable various features that Google is actively developing for Chrome, long before they’re released to the masses. Google warns that these features “may change, break, or disappear at any time. We make absolutely no guarantees about what may happen if you turn one of these experiments on, and your browser may even spontaneously combust.”
In all seriousness, though, these offer tinkerers and those who are the adventurous type to play with some really neat new things within Chrome. So far, the experimental flags for Android are:
- Override software rendering list
- Disable accelerated 2D canvass
- Disable deferred 2D canvass
- Disable accelerated CSS animations
- Composited render layer borders
- FPS counter
- GPU Accelerated SVG Filters
- Enable WebGL
- Fixed position elements create stacking contexts
- Disable hyperlink auditing
- Show Autofill predictions
- Enable tab favicon sync
- Enable sync keystore encryption
- Use new scoring in HistoryQuickProvider
- Reorder results for inlining in HistoryQuickProvider
- Inline HistoryQuickProvider suggestions
- HTTP Pipelining
- Enable SPDY/3
- Disable Media Source API on <video> elements
- Enable Experimental JavaScript
- Disable Better session restore
- Enable experimental WebKit features
- Enable CSS Shaders
- Disable the Website Settings UI
- Enable crashing on GPU hang
- Enable performance monitoring
- Enable new Autofill heuristics
- Enable full history sync
In all honesty, I only fully understand a handful of these flags, but there sure is a lot of stuff for the adventurous spirit to play with. To read more about each of these individual flags, and enable a few of them for yourself, just download the latest version of Chrome Beta, and then navigate in the Omnibox to chrome://flags/.
Download: Google Play
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