Google Chrome 35, released to the beta channel yesterday, has a bunch of new developer features for creating "richer, more compelling web content and apps, especially for mobile devices," Google said yesterday. The new features provide more control over touch and zoom input.

Google software engineer Rick Byers explains:

The touch-action CSS property offers developers a declarative mechanism to selectively disable touch scrolling, pinch-zooming, or double-tap-zooming on parts of their web content. Use cases include precise control over the dreaded 300ms click delay on mobile, reliable side-swipe UIs, and high-fidelity polyfills of Pointer Events. It’s also a prerequisite for future optimizations to enable scrolling and zooming that never block on the main thread. Also new in this release, web content on desktop computers will now receive mouse scroll wheel events with the ctrlKey modifier set. There are many sites that want to do something more appropriate for the user than trigger browser zoom. For example, when a user holds control and scrolls over a map in Google Maps, they almost certainly want to zoom in on the map, not invoke browser zoom to zoom the page. This change will enable such a use case.

Chrome 35 also brings Unprefixed Shadow DOM (document object models), which Google says improves upon the prefixed implementation first made available in Chrome 25. This move was initially controversial because Google announced its intent to ship the feature before all the parts even had a draft specification, much less a stable recommendation. "I'm left with the conclusion that these [features] are entirely undefined. I'm really surprised the Chrome team intends to ship these enabled by default in production," Apple Senior Web Technology Engineer Edward O'Connor wrote in February in a World Wide Web Consortium discussion.

Google has backed away from some of the more contentious design features of Shadow DOM and has produced draft specs that cover the new features, but the controversy is unlikely to go away. Mozilla, for example, has expressed interest in the feature, but it believes more developer feedback is necessary before unleashing it on the Web at large.

More Chrome 35 changes include support for for JavaScript features that will result in "application logic that is easier to read, more powerful, and more memory efficient." Chrome 35 also removes some features to simplify the code base and minimize security risks.

The updates described by Google apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS. A new version of Chrome typically comes out every six weeks. Chrome 35 should hit the stable channel in mid-to-late May.