Chrome is the favorite browser among all categories, but what it makes for developers too is the features it provides to the developer community. With the statement of bringing always fresh and exciting tools for the developers let’s see what can we expect from chrome in 2020. They got announced at the Indian web community lead summit and Google for Mobile conference last week so chances are you won’t find this information anywhere else.
Chromestatus.com
Before jumping into the actual features, this information is not too Top Secret. You can visit chromestatus.com to find out the upcoming, in-development and deprecated features.
New Features
Kenji Baheux ( Product Manager Google) announcing upcoming features
Portals
The goal of portals is to improve navigations, by providing faster and smoother transitions on the web, while maintaining the user’s privacy. This will be an alternate to iframes which can be implemented with similar kinds of tags.
<portal id="myPortal" src="https://www.example.com/"></portal>
Periodic Background Sync
Periodic Background Sync provides more background processing power to web apps, by allowing them to schedule a task to be run in the background periodically. The task will usually also require network connectivity and will be used by apps to update state or content. With this, any PWA can run background jobs such as download media/files offline at a specific day time
Content Indexing
The content index allows websites to register offline enabled content in the browser. This allows the browser to improve the offline experience and allow content browsing when the user is offline. This data could also be used to improve on-device search and to augment browsing history.
Web Bundles
A Web Bundle is a file format for encapsulating one or more HTTP resources in a single file. It can include one or more HTML files, JavaScript files, images, or stylesheets. This means you can carry your web project like an executable file and carry it wherever you want.
Lighthouse Bot
Lighthouse is a great tool for auditing site Performance, Accessibility and improving PWA capabilities. With the same capabilities Lighthouse bot, a CI utility is available to the public that helps in automatically performing audits on every PR.
Llama Pack
Llama Pack 🦙 is a Command Line Interface (CLI) that helps developers to create a Project for an Android application that launches an existing Progressive Web App (PWA) using a Trusted Web Activity (TWA).
New Chrome API
SMS Reciever API
SMS Reciever API solves a major bottleneck in providing seamless web experience when browsing Web Apps. It will allow web apps to get SMS content such as pin authentication which generally took users to another screen something that can force a person to jump between apps remember the pin and comes back and enters. This is already implemented in IOS safari and will be coming to chrome too.
File System API
File Handling provides a way for web applications to declare the ability to handle files with given MIME types and extensions. The web application will receive an event when the user intends to open a file with that web application. It adds more bells too such as multiple file upload, directory upload, file upload progress and drags a drop to area upload like features.
This API will allow web apps with secure access to pick contacts from the user‘s phone books. It can be implemented in various uses cases like booking air tickets for someone or filling out forms. It again reduces a lot of hassle of switching between apps and copying contacts and going back to the web app
Biometric Authentication API
Technically, Support for CTAP2 FIDO devices via the Web Authentication API will provide advanced security capabilities such as biometric authentication and resident keys (keys stored on the device).
Deprecating/ ChangingFeatures
Chrome Apps & Extensions
Chrome had a bad reputation for being RAM hungry and consuming a lot of computing power. That was true because, with every tab, every app/extension is consuming its own processor thread resulting in multiplies compute consumption. Google has already removed the app section from the chrome web store and soon will start deprecating them. Similar action to the extensions could be taken.
Cookies
Google is coming up with ever new cookie policy that could change the way we use and store cookies a lot. There is no clear information available on what it will actually do and how it will impact the user, But for sure Google is becoming more concerned with users’ privacy and this could be a major change to its policy.
Conclusion
With the passion of always staying at the top, it looks like Google is doing a pretty amazing job. But it is always dependent on the wide acceptability of the features across other browsers and by developers.
Let’s See who wants to go the extra mile to make web even better.
