Chromium Blog: web

Google I/O 2019: What's new with Chrome and the Web

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Vision for an Instant Webfoundbrowser faster and lighter

To deliver a great image loading experience without needing developers to build their own JavaScript solutions, we’re bringing lazy loading for images and iframes directly into the browser. All developers have to do is add a simple HTML attribute and Chrome will take care of the rest.

For fast sites, Chrome’s eager clearing of the page, when a user wants to navigate to another page, can be detrimental to the experience. To avoid this flash of a white “loading page”, we’re rolling out a new experiment called Paint Holding to improve navigation on the web. You can see it in action for the Awwwards website here:

Portals

Web Packaging

Signed ExchangeshereFirebasePerformance Monitoringperformance budgets directly into Lighthouse Creating a more powerful web
Working closely with the community to address the most pressing and critical needs, we’re bringing many of these features to fruition at a great pace. Some of the capabilities that we’re most excited about include SMS based authentication feature that is particularly important for developers working in markets where “one-time passwords” are an important part of the authentication process.

And while we continue our momentum here, we’ve already launched the Shape Detection APIs that enable experiences like the Web Perception toolkit that we launched at I/O today. The toolkit allows developers to integrate with the mobile camera and enable people to use their website more effectively.

With mobile gaining many such strong capabilities, we also wanted to enable developers who build quality web experiences to get more reach. So we’ve launched OYO Rooms, India’s biggest affordable hotels network, are already using Trusted Web Activities to power a lite version of their experience, a common pattern that we’re seeing amongst partners in some markets.

But the thing that we’re most excited about is the progress that we’ve made on desktop capabilities, with technologies like Web Assembly and individual media and productivity APIs unlocking many new use cases. Hulu and Google’s Duo are great examples of what’s possible on the web today. And we’re excited to have our friends at Slack join in and fully committed to roll out an offline-enabled web-powered version of their desktop app later this year.

PWAs on desktop came to ChromeOS last year, to enable web apps that need full window support and common desktop app capabilities. And now we’re excited to have extended support to Windows, Mac, and Linux.

We’re excited to see the momentum for PWAs on desktop and we wanted to ensure that we do our part to ensure that users can identify high quality PWAs and install them easily, so we’ve improved discoverability by bringing a new “Install” button directly into Chrome’s UI, within the Omnibox. This is one step to support developers building amazing experiences to get more engagement with their loyal users and we hope to continue doing more here.

In this landscape of massive device fragmentation, we wanted to see if it is possible for us to build an experience that could work across all devices, from the lowest-end feature phones to the large screen desktops. So we built a fun game - Proxx, that uses preact for UI, Comlink to be able to use workers and do more off the main thread. And yes, it works across all devices and performs well even on the most constrained ones. And because it's on the web, you can play it right here; but maybe after you're done reading. :)

Over the next year we will continue to open up even more of the capabilities that enable the next generation of games, productivity, media and social apps to come to the web, all whilst ensuring that the core principles of user safety and trust are preserved.

Bringing transparency, choice and control

User experience is extremely important to us and their safety and privacy remains at the heart of it. At I/O, we shared important upcoming changes to how Chrome will handle cookies in order to enable choice over tracking, and that enhance web security and privacy generally. And later this year, we will preview new features in Chrome that give users transparency and control over how they are tracked on the web.

We believe these changes will help improve user privacy and security on the web — but we know that it will take time. So we’re committed to working with the web ecosystem to understand how Chrome can continue to support these positive use cases and to build a better web.

Improving your developer experience

As the scope of the web platform increases and the demand from users to have ever faster, safer and more capable experiences at their fingertips it should be easier, not harder to build high-quality sites.

We built web.dev to bring our measurement tools, aka, Lighthouse and guidance all in one place. We’ve improved the site that now provides over 200 easy to follow guides for performance, safety, accessibility, resilience, and more. And at I/O, we announced our intent to build guidance for the tools that you use, starting with React.

And we’re adding the same level of personalization to Lighthouse, to give developers reports and improvement tips for the framework that they use. We’ve built in guidance for Wordpress and will be adding more over the rest of 2019 and beyond.

The web has come a long way over the last 30 years and we’re excited to be working with the developer community and other browsers with a shared mission to bring universal access to information and services to more people than ever.

Posted by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer