The State of Chrome With Addy Osmani
Published: 2019-07-11 17:19:14

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Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are experiences that are changing the way users interact with the web on mobile devices. PWAs offer fast, reliable, and meaningful engagements for mobile users. There has been a recent uptick of adoption of PWAs in emerging markets that have highlighted the performance benefits and new features that PWAs have to offer.

#Improvements
In efforts to allow PWAs to be more deeply integrated with Android, Lighthouse was created as a checklist to help guide features to be more manageable like a native app. When the features match the requirements that are tested for in Lighthouse, PWAs are then able to be listed along side native apps in the app store.

In addition to this, there is also now the option of including push notifications and shipping navigator media sessions as well as support for display full screen which gives developers full control over all real estate on the phone.

#New Features
There are a number of new releases coming up on Chrome to look forward to.
The upcoming web share API is going through is origin trial with Twitter and will reduce the extensive ground work required to enable sharing amongst users.

The Shape Detection API is available on Chrome 57. It simplifies the detection of shapes, barcodes, and articles by taking advantage of hardware acceleration within the mobile device.

Chrome is also introducing and intent to ship Image capture API that gives users the ability to control camera options such as photos, control zoom, focus, and select resolution.

The Payment Request API, available in Chrome 53, gives a native UI that makes checkout flow a lot easier. Individuals pay select and add payments in a fast and consistent manner.

#Improved Performance
Originally, V8 was successful in stressing peak performance. However, optimizations weren’t always representative of real world web apps. By using Speedometer (a benchmark that stress tests framework code) the team was able to adjust their optimization for real world workloads. By evaluating optimizing for popular websites, and spend more time in parsing and compilation, they were able to see substantial gains in performance.
New Dev Tools

Some new Chrome dev tools include code coverage, request blocking, and audits 2.0.

The code coverage feature has shipped in canary and lets users record a page, determine what javascript is executed, how much of it is used or not used, and processes code paths.

Point in time recording is included to allow for navigation across different views. CSS stats are also given depending on the time for the application being used.

Request blocking selects and blocks request URLs or request domains.
Audit 2.0 is similar to the Lighthouse in dev tools. When running an audit, you are able to run every PWA and web platform best practice test available in Lighthouse and run a report.

You can keep up with the newest features being shipped at [developers.google.com/web](developers.google.com/web) and follow Addy Osmani on twitter @addyosmani.

By Trinh Kien & Necoline Hubner

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