Isolated Splits to the Rescue

A few days of spelunking in the Android source code led us to the Chrome shipped with isolated splits in M89 we now have several months of data from the field, and are pleased to share significant improvements in memory usage, startup time, page load speed, and stability for all Chrome on Android users running Android Oreo or later:

• Median total memory usage improved by 5.2%
• Median renderer process memory usage improved by 7.9%
• Median GPU process memory usage improved by 7.6%
• Median browser process memory usage improved by 1.2%
• 95th percentile startup time improved by 7.6%
• 95th percentile page load speed improved by 2.3%
• Large improvements in both browser crash rate and renderer hang rate

Posted by Clark Duvall, Chrome Software Engineer

Data source for all statistics: Real-world data anonymously aggregated from Chrome clients.

While this kind of progress is exciting, optimizing for Core Web Vitals can still be challenging. That's why we've been improving our tools to help developers better monitor, measure, and understand site performance. Some of these changes include:

• Updates in PageSpeed Insights which make the distinction between "field data" from user experiences and "lab data" from the Lighthouse report more clear.

• Capabilities in user flow by loading additional pages and simulating scrolls and link clicks.

• Support for user flows, such as a checkout flow, in Recorder panel for exporting a recorded user journey to Puppeteer script.

We're also experimenting with two new performance metrics: overall input responsiveness and scrolling and animation smoothness. We'd love to get your feedback, so take a spin through at web.dev/smoothness.

Expanding the Toolbox for Digital Interfaces

We've got developers and designers covered with tons of changes coming down the pipeline for UI styling and DevTools, including updates to responsive design. Developers can now customize user experiences in a component-driven architecture model, and we're calling this The New Responsive:

With the new container queries spec—available for testing behind a flag in Chrome Canary—developers can access a parent element's width to make styling decisions for its children, nest container queries, and create named queries for easier access and organization.

This is a huge shift for component-based development, so we've been providing new DevTools for debugging, styling, and visualizing CSS layouts. To make creating interfaces even easier, we also launched a collection of off-the-shelf UI patterns.

Developers who want to learn more can dive into free resources such as Learn CSS course. There are also a few exciting CSS APIs in their first public working drafts, including:

• Scroll-timeline for animating an element as people scroll (available via the experimental web platform features flag in Chrome Canary).

• Size-adjust property for typography (available in Chromium and Firefox stable).

• Accent-color for giving form controls a theme color (available in Chromium and Firefox stable).

One feature we're really excited to build on is Dark Mode, especially because we found indications that dark themes use 11% less battery power than light themes for OLED screens. Stay tuned for a machine-learning-aided, auto-dark algorithm feature in an upcoming version of Chrome.

Buckling Down for the Road Ahead

Part of what makes the web so special is that it's an open, decentralized ecosystem. We encourage everyone to make the most of this by getting involved in shaping the web's future in places such as:

• The Chromium open-source project
• Standards bodies such as the W3C and WHATWG
• web.dev and our @ChromiumDev Twitter account
• Workshops, group learning lounges, and one-on-one office hours we'll be hosting over the next month

We can't wait to see what the web looks like by next year's summit. Until then, check out our library of learning resources on the web.dev newsletter.