Google Chrome’s version 25 was released packed with new features including support for speech recognition with the help of the all new Web Speech API. Starting this release silent extension install will also be disabled from now on for security and privacy purposes. All previously installed extensions that are silently installed will also be disabled. Another feature that will be made available since this release is WebRTC which will enable video and voice communication. A demo for this was recently announced by Google and Mozilla that showed Firefox and Chrome talking to each other.
The Web Speech API is something that looks like it has been taken straight out of Android. This will allow web developers to build speech recognition into their web applications. If used to its full extent it could rival features that involve speech recognition is various type of extensions and plugins. This will enable as yet unexplored use case for speech interaction within the browser and extend the concept to the desktop from mobile phones.
Due to some security issues being reported in the webkit implementation for MathML, it has been disabled since this release and will be re-enabled at a future date when it is felt that it is ready for release again.
According to the blog, many developer related features like the unprefixed content security policy support and prefixed support for shadow DOM. Other changes include the Resource Timing API, which shows timing information related to subcomponents in a web page. The User Timing API on the other hand helps improve web app performance. There have also been some changes to the Web Audio API, which is used for processing and synthesizing audio in web apps. For more detailed developer related changes, you can refer to the SVN revision log, or check out the blog post here.
