The web ahead

(upbeat music) - Hello, I’m Paul Kinlan. I hope that you’ve enjoyed the last two days. We’ve had lots of fun creating the content, and we had a great time meeting you in our virtual experience The Chrome Dev Summit Adventure. The web is a vital part of people’s day-to-day lives. And during these last nine months, we’ve seen a shift from physical moments to everything moving digital.

00:24 - And we’ve seen a massive increase in the usage of the web. I know that many of my team, like many of you, have been and will be celebrating your holidays away from your friends and family. And we believe that the web can help you bring those together. Our goal with this event has been to show you how you can help connect people around the world with experiences that they love to use. And as you build great sites and apps, there are three core areas that we hope you’ll focus on in the next year.

00:50 - As the world moved digital, your users’ safety and privacy is more important than ever. We want to make it harder for sites and services to track you without breaking critical use cases like sign-in, payments and monetization. In January, we announced that we’d be changing the way that cookies work on the web, restricting them to first party by default and requiring developers to explicitly state when they can be used in a third-party context, all via the same-site attribute. This was done with the goal to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. This and a number of other privacy-focused changes have rolled out across Chrome with more in the pipeline.

01:27 - And you can use our tooling to help you identify these issues and fix them. Moving on, it’s long been known that the performance of your site or web app has an impact on your user’s experience. We believe that one of the biggest investments that you can make in the next year is to focus on your Core Web Vitals. The Core Web Vitals program kicked off with three metrics across loading, interactivity and stability with the intention to give you direct feedback into how your users experience your site. These metrics let you more easily target where to put your team’s effort when focusing on building a better experience.

02:02 - And even more recently, the search team announced that a page’s Core Web Vitals and a range of other signals will be considered when ranking results in search. And finally, the web platform has become increasingly more powerful, allowing to build rich and capable experiences that work the way people have come to expect, but without an install. Take a look at these new APIs and see how you can progressively integrate them into your site to build better experiences that have never been possible on the web before. I look at the last 10 years of Chrome, and I’m inspired by how closely we’ve kept to that early mission of building a browser that meets the need of the people using the web whether it’s for sites or rich web apps. But the world has changed in the last 10 years.

02:45 - Mobile became a major focus in the industry with the introduction of the iPhone and then Android, and mobile has brought computing to billions of people, changing the way that people think about using the web. So with that in mind, I’ve asked Alex Russell, one of the leads for the Web Platform Team and the tech lead for the Project Fugu, to give us some insight into the properties that make the web so unique and why we feel our mission is so critical and how we think about moving the web forwards. - Thanks, Paul. Chrome’s mission has always been to move the web forward, but what direction is forward? That’s a question I spend a lot of time thinking about. As computing has shifted to mobile, the fundamental environment for software has changed in ways that are deeper than whether or not we click or tap. So how can a platform like the web adapt? The press sometimes focuses on small differences and exclusive features, which are by definition niche while they’re new.

03:39 - If the web supported those features on day one, damn the portability, would that be forward? Not exactly, but neither is freezing the set of things the platform can do any time. There wasn’t a perfect year for the web. So how do we choose what to add? Can we come up with a model that helps guide us? I think we can. First, we should recognize that the web is a meta platform. Like Flash or Java, the web (indistinct) over operating systems and frameworks to enable portable content that isn’t locked into a single OS or product. This portability enabled by good licensing terms, lets your sites run on any device with a modern browser.

04:17 - Meta platforms aren’t always successful though, despite this advantage in portability. To understand why some go the distance and others fade, I like to think about how developers place bets. Imagine you’re the tech lead or product manager of a team starting a new project for a client. Your team has a set of existing skills, but those aren’t necessarily a hard constraint. If the entire industry is going to a new framework or operating system, the new project is as good an excuse as any to learn it.

04:43 - The capabilities of those platforms are table stakes however. If a core requirement of the project can’t be met, it doesn’t matter how cheap it is to build the UI. You simply won’t choose that platform. The same might be true if you fear it won’t keep up with you. Your chosen approach also needs to deliver value. Building once and customizing perform factor can be much cheaper than rebuilding the same experience multiple times and it can help keep your iteration velocity up. The ability to AB test matters a lot.

05:15 - Over time, clients will want to work with firms that can deliver more for less. Now, mentally zoom out from the single project and decision point. Think about the thousands of new projects that get started every single day. Now drive forward through time. A month, then a year, then the full five-year life of a project. Each one has folks who’ve made, are making or will make the same choices with perhaps slightly different constraints, timelines and experiences.

05:44 - As time flies by, we can see platforms rise and fall one project choice at a time. Each choice persists for the full life of the product, but choices about how to rebuild are made years apart in potentially very different worlds. No platform can continue to succeed if it doesn’t win business in the intervening time too. These choice moments can feel disconnected but are in fact bound together. Can the system you bet on continue to reach your users while continuing to enable the lion’s share of things you want computers to do? Or do they fall off the trend line and become legacy systems? It’s this list, the set of things that most computers can do that is foundationally important and yet so often obscured in our conversations by shiny niche features.

06:32 - Systems like the web are always giving up a little capability in trade for a lot more reach. And when that formula nets out, developers and users win. But platforms that fail to grow at the same rate as the set of really common features become harder and harder to bet on as time goes by. For platforms, stasis is just a delay in delivery of the news that you’re a relevant. Platforms that stave off that irrelevance, do so by continuing to meet the choices of teams as they come up for air and consider their options afresh.

07:04 - The long arc of computing is that devices get more features every year at lower costs. That means the set of things that most computers can do expands inexorably at a pretty constant rate. As the set grows, applications that were previously niche or available only on proprietary platforms, transition to meta platforms if they can support them. That unlocks huge benefits in cost, security and reach. For instance, it wasn’t that long ago that the web’s historic strengths weren’t enough to make video conferencing work well in the browser.

07:35 - Handling mouse and keyboard events, rendering text and drawing boxes might’ve been enough to support news or email, but they didn’t get at enough of the features needed for video. Over time, prodded by plugins and proprietary tools, web went on a journey. First browsers got good at video. Next, we learned to talk to cameras and mics and speak low-latency networking protocols. Today those features are key not only to our endless 2020 video conferencing lifecycle but to a whole new class of applications. Closing the gap, let video conference move into the browser, but happily and perhaps accidentally, enabled desktop sharing and streaming games.

08:14 - These adjacent use cases turn out to happen every time we expand the platform. Stadia, GeForce NOW, and Luna combine things that the web has been good at for a long time with better codex and a few new capabilities like gamepad and HID device support. The result isn’t just email with video conferencing, but fundamentally new product categories that help keep the web ecosystem relevant. Productivity apps are undergoing a similar revolution as we add a few seemingly small capabilities that build on the great set of core features that the web has had. Access to fonts, local files and full board compute aren’t optional for products like Adobe Spark, Google Earth, SketchUp, Figma, and Photopea.

08:56 - But thanks to the web’s rich existing feature set and massive reach, helping them move to a better, safer distribution channel doesn’t require a whole new platform, just some targeted incremental additions. Platforms that choose to stay in one lane are inevitably picking the legacy lane. And when that happens, the vibrance and investment that they once attracted fades away. For the web to stay healthy, it does need to support more of our computing lives every year, but that doesn’t mean adding every geegaw and what’s it from the latest devices. Instead, we unlock a better future by steady integration of stuff that looks boring.

09:31 - But at the web scale and portability, boring can be revolutionary. - That’s interesting. So meta platforms have to adapt to survive and we’ve used mobile apps as a lens to focus our ideas for improving the web platform. For example, with more app-like features, like push notifications, sensor access and P2 way installation, Alex, maybe you could just dive into that a little bit more. How should we ensure we focus on the right platform improvements as people’s usage of the web changes in the years to come and how do we keep new features from undermining the value of the existing ecosystem? I know a lot of developers worry about the risks of adding new features. - It’s a great question. And the how is just as important as the what.

10:15 - Lots of platforms have fallen by the wayside because they took shortcuts and earned bad reputations for security. So nothing we add to the web can ever be allowed to undermine user trust. This is a key advantage for the web. Traditional software hasn’t given users much in the way of control. And legacy apps can often access every device attached to a computer or the sensitive files or internal network services with impunity. We know a better version of computing is possible because we’ve seen computers get easier and safer as we’ve moved more of our lives to the web and off of legacy closed platforms.

10:48 - Everything we do to open up new capabilities is of course a balancing act. Do users understand the choices we’re presenting? Can we limit the scope of permission grants? And how easy is it to revoke them? How can we flag that things are being used so that users can make revocation choices? And how do we keep those choices from overwhelming users? Operating systems are iterating in this space too, but the web’s low friction means that we have to meet a higher bar. I’m happy to say that across dozens of features that we’ve added in recent years, the care that we’ve taken so far has meant that the sky has in fact not fallen. The web’s power comes from making the devices you already have the best versions of themselves. We aren’t trying to get you to buy a new computer or a new phone, we’re trying to make computing livable, safe and capable.

11:36 - While we’re doing that, we also want to help you build a bridge from your legacy applications to that better world. Web Assembly and these new APIs are opening up opportunities to connect the past to a better, safer future, and to make software easier and more humane for users in the process. Some folks argue that most users don’t need these new features. Perhaps, but it’s a chicken and egg problem. And we can learn from this set of things that most computers can do, while being careful and intentional about expanding the web to meet those needs too.

12:08 - We can’t predict the next game streaming breakthrough, but we can follow the breadcrumbs and open up the next video conferencing by listening to you, our developers. We’re committed to growing the reach of the web, and that means helping you succeed both now and the next time you have to make a choice about which platform to build with. After all, the only way the Chrome team succeeds is if the web as a whole thrives. - Thanks, Alex. Our vision for the web started well before that first comic. We want to help you build great experiences.

12:39 - But we know that we can’t get there alone. The web is the most democratic platform. There is no one owner. So many people and organizations have worked across the ecosystem to help make the platform what it is today. From companies and my partners, whether big like Adobe, bringing Spark to the web, or an independent developer like Photopea. They all want to provide a better experience for their users by pushing the boundaries of what the web can do. Our Google Developer Experts who provide critical feedback so we can help make the platform work for the ecosystem and who help us get the message out to developers about what’s new and what’s possible.

13:16 - The browser vendors who work together to create consensus for the new features you need so they can be implemented in a safe and consistent way and you can write your code once for all browsers. And most importantly you, the feedback that you provide and the amazing experiences you create, inspire us to help push the web forwards so you can make something even better. Thank you for joining us over the last two days. We hope that you’ve enjoyed the sessions, but we’re not finished yet. You can continue interacting with our team in CDS Adventure, and we look forward to seeing you there. (upbeat music) .