TECHNO WORLD BEYOND FUTURE: Chrome 55 Beta adds new features such as Download Manager, offline pages, media player changes, and more

Chrome 54 was just released, bringing a substantial amount of changes for both users and developers. Now the first Chrome 55 Beta has been released for all platforms, and there is a fair number of changes for both users and developers.

Media player changes

Chrome 55 brings a few changes to the browser's HTML5 video/audio player. First, on some pages with video or audio content, a new download icon is visible. Tapping said icon starts downloading the media file. This is part of Chrome's download manager, which has to be enabled with the flag#enable-downloads-ui.

Share button inside web pages

This feature, called the Web Share API, is still very much in development and has not yet been adopted as a web standard. Even so, I still think it's worth mentioning. This proposed feature allows websites to share data to the destination of the user's choice. It is essentially Android's share button, but inside web pages.

Developer features

Every Chrome release brings new features for both users and web developers, and there is a massive number of additions in this release. Some of these are very exciting, and I can't wait for sites to start using them (well, most of them).

Unified input handling: Web pages still detect input mostly the same as they did ten years ago, with APIs not designed with touch-controlled smartphones in mind. The new Pointer Events API allows pages to better-detect how you interact with a page, and replaces the janky MouseEvent and TouchEvent APIs. Basically, web pages using the old APIs will be much faster if they use the new Pointer Events API.
Touch actions: This is an extension of the last feature, but web pages can now change what touch actions you can perform on a page. For example, a site can block panning the page down or only allow scroll/zoom. The only beneficial use I see for this are for games, where accidentally scrolling on the page might cause input issues. Otherwise, this will probably be used by malicious pop-up ads just like the stupid HTML5 Vibrate API.
Asynchronous functions: This is really only interesting to developers, so I'll let Google's page about it do the talking.