Chrome 100 Beta is launching with a new icon in tow (APK Download)

Google saved up quite a few announcements for the first three-digit release

Chrome 100 is one of the more drummed up browser releases in a while, likely owing to the fact that it’s the first to pass the magical three-digit threshold. The company has long started to coordinate its features in a way that they would go live right with this special version number, and as such, we have quite a few things to talk about for this release. Given that this is the beta version that is still lacking Google’s official consumer-facing announcement, we wouldn’t be surprised if even more features were to be revealed at a later date.

Chrome 100 has a pretty new icon

Google Chrome’s logo has been starting to get a little long in the tooth, with the last (not quite substantial) redesign happening in 2014. Since a lot of design paradigms have changed since then, Google likely thought it was time to freshen things up just a little. The new 2022 logo comes with ever-so-slightly more saturated colors and does away with the inconspicuous shadows separating the individual colors of the wheel. The center blue “eye” is also growing just a little.

Chrome 100 for mobile will retire its data-saving Lite mode

The company behind Chrome has announced that once version 100 will go stable on March 29, 2022, the data-saving mode is going to be a thing of the past. Google will turn off its servers that took care of all that compression, causing Lite mode to disappear for everyone regardless of which version of Chrome they’re using. In its announcement, Google argues that data plans are becoming ever cheaper and that many web technologies bringing native data-saving options to websites have been introduced in the meantime, making the dedicated mode unnecessary.

Chrome 100 for Android introduces an optional confirmation dialog for closing all tabs at once

With the chrome://flags/#close-all-tabs-modal-dialog flag activated, Chrome 100 will ask you to confirm if you really want to close all 150 tabs you’ve currently got open on your smartphone when you hit the Close all tabs button in the overflow menu. This might just be a passing experiment, as the current behavior lets you undo the action via a pop-up message (or Snackbar). Nevertheless, asking you to confirm your action before it’s done might lead to just a little less panic, and anything that reduces stress comes a long way in this day and age.

Chrome 100 further refines the new experimental download experience

Google has been working on a new download interface and workflow for a while now, and Chrome 100 further refines the yet-to-be-publicly available redesign some more. In the future, you’ll no longer see the download bar at the bottom of Chrome’s interface. Instead, the browser is looking to move details on your current downloads behind an icon in the taskbar at the top, next to the address bar. Chrome 100 has finally added a proper circular loading animation to this icon, indicating how far your current downloads have progressed.

Chrome 100 is working on bringing back the easy way to mute tabs

The new version of Chrome introduces a chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting flag that makes it possible to simply click the loudspeaker icon indicating audio playback within a tab to mute said website; right-clicking is no longer required. If this seems familiar, it’s because it is. The click-audio-icon-to-mute feature was standard for Chrome until 2018, when it was inexplicably removed.

Chrome 100 ships its multi-screen window placement API in stable

It makes sense for some web apps like slideshows or conferencing tools to take advantage of somebody’s multi-screen setup. If more than one screen is detected, a slideshow could open a speaker view on one screen and the slideshow only on the other, for example. Chrome 100 is making this a reality thanks to new screen information APIs that help web apps become aware of someone’s setup. Google initially started testing this in Chrome 93, and it’s shipping in stable with Chrome 100, so prepare for the first few web apps to take advantage of this.

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You can download Chrome 100 Beta over on APK Mirror for your Android phone or wait until it rolls out to you on the Play Store. The new version should already be available for everyone on desktop.

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