Google announced the latest stable version for this year of the most used web browser in the world, Google Chrome 108, which carries, as usual, some new features and changes for both users and developers, in addition to 28 security fixes to the vulnerabilities discovered in the browser.
Google Chrome 108 provides a solution to one of the biggest problems that the Chrome browser is famous for, devouring the device resources, by adding two new features that enable the browser to save some of the device's battery and RAM.
The first feature is named "Energy Saver", and it enables Chrome to limit some background activities and visual effects such as smooth scrolling and video frame rate when the computer is unplugged, or when the battery comes to 20 percent or less, while the second feature is called "Memory Saver" and it enables the browser to put the open tabs that haven't been used for a while in sleep mode, which helps to save some RAM that the browser uses, as well as in the device battery.
These two features do not appear by default yet in the browser settings, and their activation requires entering the Chrome flags page, searching for "Enable the battery saver mode feature in the settings" (chrome://flags/#battery-saver-mode-available) and "Enable the high efficiency mode feature in the settings" (chrome://flags/#high-efficiency-mode-available), then choose the "Enabled" option from the side menu as shown in the picture, and then restart the browser.
This update also brings a change to the way the onscreen keyboard is displayed in Chrome on Android devices so that it is now displayed the same way it is displayed in Chrome on iOS and iPadOS. With this change, Chrome on Android will no longer resize the Layout Viewport, and instead resize only the Visual Viewport.
When you enter a website on a mobile device, the web browser does not show you the entire page, but only a part of it: this is what is known as the “Layout Viewport”. When you zoom in on the web page, you do not see the entire Layout Viewport, but only part of it, which is what is known as the "Visual Viewport".
In other words, when displaying the on-screen keyboard in Chrome 108 and later, on Android devices, the browser will no longer resize the visible section of the website but instead slides the keyboard over the content currently visible at the bottom of the screen. Website developers can force Chrome to use the old way of on-screen keyboard rendering (site resizing) by adding a meta tag to their site.
For iOS devices, Google Chrome 108 brings a feature that allows external links to be opened on an incognito page to give users more privacy. This setting does not appear by default in the browser settings, and it requires entering the Chrome flags page to enable it and searching for “Third-party intents in incognito” (chrome://flags/#3p-intents-in-incognito). Once enabled, this new option will appear within the browser settings menu -> Privacy and Security page.
With Chrome 108, the browser can detect if a website supports COLRv1, and then use it to display sharper emojis. Google unveiled COLRv1 color vector fonts with version 98 of Chrome about a year ago, intending to make web fonts such as emoji more beautiful and sharper while reducing their size as well. This feature provides users with emojis in saturated colors and helps developers reduce site sizes and provide a better user experience for their visitors.
Lastly, Chrome 108 has also some new features and capabilities for web developers including hints for inactive CSS properties, auto-detect XPath and text selectors in the Recorder panel, and an improved ignore list setting; you can learn more about those features on the "What's new in Chrome DevTools (108)" blog by following this link.
