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Chrome Dev Summit 2019: Elevating the Web Together

Monday, November 11, 2019

As the largest open ecosystem in history, the Web is a tremendous utility, with more than 1.5B active websites on the Internet today, serving nearly 4.5B web users across the world. This kind of diversity (geography, device, content, and more) can only be facilitated by the open web platform.
Users uniquely experience the Web as one as they navigate from site to site, and thus the responsibility is with all of us to work on delivering quality experiences that reach all.
At this year’s Chrome Developer Summit (CDS), we are focusing on giving developers the capabilities to reach the bar that our users demand. To help further foster the diversity and capability for web developers, we’ve been working closely with the ecosystem to make enhancements to the web platform, improve developer experience, and make meaningful updates to the browser itself.

Enhancing the versatility of the Web
Our vision is to make loading disappear for all our users. At I/O this year, we previewed Portals, which allows developers to create seamless experiences by pre-rendering content and optionally embedding it in the page to change the way users navigate across the web. We’re pleased to see the new style navigation from early partners like Fandango have been testing on their site already. Portals is available behind the chrome://flags/#enable-portals flag for developers to experiment with.

At CDS this year, we’re previewing Web Bundles, an infrastructural API that will allow developers to distribute their web content across any format - email, FTP, or even USB, without any compromises. Not only does this unlock delivery of web content at lightning fast speeds, it will also allow for peer-to-peer distribution even when users are offline. In the future, APIs like Background Periodic Sync and Content Indexing will allow developers to proactively cache and surface relevant web content for people even if they’re not on an active internet connection. Web Bundles is now available behind the experimental flag, and the other two are now available as origin trials.
Consumption of web content has never been more diverse; while the rise of mobile-first in developing markets has been well documented, we’re now seeing an increase in cross-device computing with the youth across the globe. We’re committed to making the platform powerful enough for developers to create amazing modern experiences that users expect while taking advantage of the frictionless of the web. By focusing our efforts on enabling fully capable web applications, we’ve been working to bring many primitives to the platform, including:

SMS Receiver, allowing web apps to retrieve two-factor SMS messages.

Contact Picker, which will allow people to share web content to their contact lists, bringing social media and communication capabilities to web apps.

Native File System API, enables web apps to read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user's device. This allows developers to build powerful web apps that interact with files on the user's local device, like IDEs, photo and video editors, text editors, and more.

There’s a lot more that we’re working on in this space and we can’t wait to see what you build with these capabilities. You can read all about our latest work in our blog on supporting new web experiences.

Enabling developer success no matter the framework or CMS
As web developers, we’re on a collective journey providing people their best, unique web experience. This collective responsibility makes accurate, actionable data on the health of the web increasingly important.
CDS gives us a checkpoint to see how we are doing and have a discussion on where we go next. We use the HTTP Archive to see how the web is built and the Chrome User Experience Report to see how it is experienced. Over the past year, we’re seeing a positive growth in the percentage of sites with fast First Contentful Paint and fast First Input Delay, our core metrics for loading and interactivity.
Measuring user experience quality is multi-faceted, today we introduced two new metrics to give developers a holistic view of how their sites are performing. Largest Contentful Paint (how quickly users see the most meaningful page content) and Cumulative Layout Shift (how stable a page feels).
Now, data is great, but insights that lead to fixes and improvements are better. We often get asked “What do I do with this information?” We’ve collaborated with many experts from the community on The Web Almanac, to give developers a holistic view of the health of the web. We launched over 17 chapters today and we’re excited to continue to identify and share more such insights.

Developers work incredibly hard to move their performance metrics in the right direction, so we are looking at ways to reward developers for going the extra mile. Today we are sharing some early explorations which surface speed signals in Chrome’s UI.

Frameworks, libraries and CMS’es form a critical part of the developer ecosystem and we’re keen to support them on their journey of creating instant and seamless for their users. Earlier this year we created Lighthouse Stack Packs for WordPress and React to support their developer ecosystems in build fast and reliable sites, and today we’ve increased the coverage include Angular, AMP as well as the ecommerce CMS, Magento, bring more actionable insights to developers irrespective of the tools developers use.
We’ve been excited to see that the Framework Fund has supported a number of meaningful projects that make it easier to hit the performance bars by default, and we’re looking forward to seeing more projects being funded this year.
Finally, we have launched Lighthouse CI to make sure that developers are given insights for each pull request. Developers can quickly hook up Lighthouse CI to their build pipeline to get a rich diff of the changes that they made and the impact it had on the quality of their site.

Making the browser work for you
We believe the web is for everyone, no matter their device type, internet speed or purchasing power. To help ensure the platform remains accessible to all, we’re investing in performance and memory improvements to the browser, including bringing new features like Image Lazy Loading that is now going to be available to Chrome Lite users by default, and Paint Holding, shipping soon in Chrome.
The web needs to be a safe and trustworthy place for everyone. Furthering our initiatives around HTTPS encryption, we began working with the community to start blocking all mixed content - insecure HTTP subresources on HTTPS pages - by default, and also experimenting with DNS over HTTPS, which offers better security and privacy by encrypting the traffic between the browser and DNS provider
We are also following up on our I/O promise to make our existing third-party cookie controls more visible. Starting with the Chrome M79 Beta, we’re experimenting with a toggle for controlling third-party cookies on the Incognito New Tab Page. We are also working on redesigning our settings pages to make access to this control easier in regular mode. And finally, apart from continuing to make progress to improve the existing cookies infrastructure, we’re also continuing to develop our Privacy Sandbox, a secure environment for content that also protects user privacy.
We want to thank the entire web community for their continued investment in a platform that is so impactful to so many people around the world. We believe it is our collective responsibility to elevate the web experience for every user and in that spirit, let's celebrate the 'We' in Web.
Posted by Dion Almaer, Web Developer Ecosystem

Making new experiences possible on the web

Monday, November 11, 2019

The web that we know today has come a long way from its humble beginnings as simple interlinked documents; today it powers a huge number of rich services and applications.

Content consumption is at the heart of the web, however there are many tasks that people need to turn to native applications to accomplish. Our vision is that applications shouldn't require heavyweight downloads or updates. The web should be more than enough for any user experience.

What Makes the Web Special for Apps

The greatest strength of the web is the incredible ease of access. Content and functionality is immediately available to users without any installs or setup required. We have all enjoyed this ease of access for shopping, email, banking, connecting with friends, and much more, but there is no reason this ease of access can’t apply to practically any use case. Because of the hardened sandbox and progressive permission model of the web, users don’t have to worry about clicking a link the same way they need to worry about downloading an executable.

The URL and linkability supercharge the distribution and virality of applications and makes collaboration easy. With a web application, users can share a link through any channel and the receiving user can click that string to quickly access the application. Users sharing the link don’t need to worry about whether the receiving user has the application installed or if their OS even supports it; the application is simply there and works everywhere. This ease of sharing and ease of access also dramatically widens the user acquisition funnel.

The web is a truly open platform. You control the availability of your site and no one can block your users from accessing it. The web is also built on open standards and every major renderer is open source. This means you aren’t dependent on any one specific company or OS and as new devices & platforms emerge the web will be supported there as well.

Chromium's 3 Piece solution

Today, anyone with a browser can collaborate on complex designs, create CAD drawings, edit documents, watch endless videos, and play tons of games, but there are still gap compared to what native applications can do. These are tasks like complex editing, creativity tools, and advanced device communication. Chromium is pursuing WebAssembly, Advanced Capabilities, and Progressive Web Apps in order to close them.

WebAssembly: Powerful Portability

Developers should be able to performantly bring existing investments in low-level languages like C++ to the web. The need for reliable, high performance for demanding workloads has also been a reason some apps avoid the web. Our answer to both these needs is WebAssembly.

WebAssembly uses a combination of low-level primitives and strong static typing to deliver predictable performance for low-level code, avoiding the performance cliffs and GC pauses. With additions like threads and SIMD, applications can make full use of modern, multi-core processors with advanced instruction sets.

Because WebAssembly is a compilation target, it allows developers to bring their existing applications and libraries to the web without rewriting in JavaScript. The Emscripten toolchain offers a lot of porting support and has let applications such as AutoCAD & Sketchup come to the web, and the results are amazing. The web's advantages of easy sharing and collaboration, applied to advanced productivity apps, open up whole new ways of working.

Advanced Capabilities: Securely granting access to powerful capabilities

For Web Apps to be as useful as native apps, they need to have access to the same device capabilities that native apps enjoy, like file system access, NFC communication, contact picker, geolocation, and many more.

Exposing these capabilities in a user-understandable and safe way is a big challenge, but one that Chromium is committed to. The web works through a progressive permission model, where each capability is granted as needed through user permission and is as limited in scope as possible. This is in contrast to native apps, which can get full access to your file system, while web apps can only save back to folders and files you have explicitly shared and given write permission for. For capabilities like USB or Bluetooth, we allow the user to choose the specific device they would like to share.

Progressive Web Apps: The native feel with web superpowers

Web apps need to behave like other applications and be in the places users expect them to be in order to earn a central place in our lives. Our answer is Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).

PWAs can be installed and behave like any native app. Once installed they are launched from the same place as other installed apps and open in their own window. We are also working with Microsoft and Chrome OS to provide deeper integration such as appropriate storage management attribution. PWAs can even be listed in the Microsoft and Samsung Galaxy store and can utilize Trusted Web Activities to be in the Play store.

Here’s to an ever advancing web

The web has come a long way since its original inception. The web is a truly unique platform with properties that benefit users and developers. Through the enabling technologies of WebAssembly, powerful capabilities, and PWAs, developers will be able to create any experience their users need and utilize the web’s amazing properties.

Posted by Thomas Nattestad, Product Manager, Awesome web experiences

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Chrome Dev Summit 2019: Elevating the Web Together

Making new experiences possible on the web

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