Chromium Blog: November 2016

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Chrome Dev Summit 2016: The Mobile Web Moves Forward

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Last week at the 4th annual Chrome Dev Summit, we were excited to share a glimpse of what’s possible with over 1,000 developers in person, and thousands more on the livestream. Each year this is a time to hear what developers have been building, share our vision for the future of the web platform, and celebrate what we love about the web...

Reach of the web As we've talked about before, one of the superpowers of the web is its incredible reach. There are now more than two billion active Chrome browsers worldwide, with many more web users across other browsers. The majority of these users are now on mobile devices, bringing new opportunities for us to explore as an industry.
Mobile browsers also lead the way for the internet’s newest users. Exclusively accessing the internet from mobile devices, users in emerging markets struggle with limited computing power, unreliable networks, and expensive data. For these users, native apps can be a poor match due to their large data and storage requirements. And, it’s these constraints that have resulted in the developing markets leading the charge when it comes to innovating on the web.
Progressive Instead, the web can fill these needs for all users through an experience we've been calling Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). These web apps provide the performance users have come to expect from their device, while also offering critical capabilities such as offlining, add-to-homescreen, and push notifications. We've been encouraged by the strong adoption of these capabilities, with push notifications recently exceeding 18 billion notifications per day across 50,000 domains.
Last year when we spoke about PWAs, things were just getting started. Now we're seeing the movement in full swing, with many large sites across the globe launching great new apps and feeling the success that PWAs can bring. DAY 1 - THAO LOGOS.png

DAY 1 - THAO LOGOS.png

Alibaba.com, built a PWA and saw a 76% increase in conversion rates across browsers. The investment in the mobile web increased monthly active user rates on iOS by 14 percent. On Android devices where re-engagement capabilities like push notifications and Add to Homescreen were enabled, active user rates increased by 30 percent.

Another great example is The Weather Channel. Since launching a PWA they achieved an 80% reduction in load time and within three months, saw almost 1 million users opt in to receive web push notifications.

During the Summit, we also heard from Lyft, who shared their experience of building a PWA in less than a month, and using less than a quarter of the engineering support needed to build their native app. Learn more about our how partners are using PWA technologies to enhance their mobile web experience.

What can you do? We also have a variety of tools, libraries, and APIs available to help you bring the benefits of PWAs to your site. For example, Chrome's DevTools provides assistance along every step of the development flow. DevTools has a ton of new features to help you build great mobile apps, such as network simulation, CPU throttling, and a PWA audit tool powered by Lighthouse.

For developers just beginning their web app or looking to rework an existing one, the Polymer App Toolbox provides a set of components and tools for easily building a Progressive Web App using web components. And Polymer 2.0 is right around the corner, making it easy to take advantage of the new Web Components v1 APIs shipping cross-browser and build mobile web apps with minimal overhead.

Finally, checkout can be a complicated process to complete and in the retail sector alone there are 66% fewer conversions on mobile than on desktop. With PaymentRequest, you can now bring a seamless checkout experience to your website with support for both credit cards and Android Pay, increasing odds for conversion.

Catch up Finally, if you didn’t catch our live stream in real time, you can always check back on our YouTube channel for all the recordings or see the highlights from the event in 57 seconds.

Thanks for coming, thanks for watching, and most of all, thank you for developing for the web!
Posted by Darin Fisher, VP Engineering, Chrome

Here’s to more HTTPS on the web!

Friday, November 4, 2016

Security has always been critical to the web, but challenges involved in site migration have inhibited HTTPS adoption for several years. In the interest of a safer web for all, at Google we’ve worked alongside many others across the online ecosystem to better understand and address these challenges, resulting in real change. A web with ubiquitous HTTPS is not the distant future. It’s happening now, with secure browsing becoming standard for users of Chrome.

Today, we’re adding a new section to the HTTPS Report Card in our Transparency Report that includes data on how HTTPS usage has been increasing over time. More than half of pages loaded and two-thirds of total time spent by Chrome desktop users occur via HTTPS, and we expect these metrics to continue their strong upward trajectory. Chart

Chart

Percentage pages loaded over HTTPS in Chrome
As the remainder of the web transitions to HTTPS, we’ll continue working to ensure that migrating to HTTPS is a no-brainer, providing business benefit beyond increased security. HTTPS currently enables the best performance the web offers and powerful features that benefit site conversions, including both new features such as service workers for offline support and web push notifications, and existing features such as credit card autofill and the HTML5 geolocation API that are too powerful to be used over non-secure HTTP.

As with all major site migrations, there are certain steps webmasters should take to ensure that search ranking transitions are smooth when moving to HTTPS. To help with this, we’ve posted two FAQs to help sites transition correctly, and will continue to improve our web fundamentals guidance.

We’ve seen many sites successfully transition with negligible effect on their search ranking and traffic. Brian Wood, Director of Marketing SEO at Wayfair, a large retail site, commented “we were able to migrate Wayfair.com to HTTPS with no meaningful impact to Google rankings or Google organic search traffic. We are very pleased to say that all Wayfair sites are now fully HTTPS.” CNET, a large tech news site, had a similar experience. “We successfully completed our move of CNET.com to HTTPS last month,” said John Sherwood, Vice President of Engineering & Technology at CNET. “Since then, there has been no change in our Google rankings or Google organic search traffic.”

Webmasters that include ads on their sites also carefully monitor ad performance and revenue during large site migrations. The portion of Google ad traffic served over HTTPS has increased dramatically over the past 3 years. All ads that come from any Google source always support HTTPS, including AdWords, AdSense or DoubleClick Ad Exchange; ads sold directly, such as those through DoubleClick for Publishers, still need to be designed to be HTTPS-friendly. This means there will be no change to the Google-sourced ads that appear on a site after migrating to HTTPS. Many publishing partners have seen this in practice after a successful HTTPS transition. Jason Tollestrup, Director of Programmatic Advertising for the Washington Post, “saw no material impact to AdX revenue with the transition to SSL.”

As migrating to HTTPS becomes even easier, we’ll continue working towards a web that’s secure by default. Don’t hesitate to start planning your HTTPS migration today!
Posted by Adrienne Porter Felt and Emily Schechter, Chrome Security Team