Google Shares Plans For More Instant Chrome Experience

Google revealed its latest plans for the web at the Chrome Dev Summit in San Francisco on Monday (Nov. 11), including offering its users instantaneous experiences.

Dion Almaer, Google director of engineering, said the company wants to “make loading disappear, for all our users,” according to VentureBeat.

With that in mind, the tech giant unveiled Web Bundles, currently available behind an experimental flag, which allows developers to distribute web content across any format at faster speeds, as well as distribute content even when a user is offline. And it also showcased Portals, now available behind a flag in Chrome, which lets developers give users instant access to their web experiences. In fact, a few companies are already utilizing Portals, including Fandango.

Google even wants to figure out how to inform users of a site’s speed through the use of clear badging that will point out sites that are “authored in a way that makes them slow generally, looking at historical load latencies.” The company might also include “identifying when a page is likely to be slow for a user based on their device and network conditions.”

In addition, the company plans to help developers create native-like experiences by bringing primitives to the web, including SMS Receiver, which will let apps retrieve two-factor SMS messages; Contact Picker, which allows users to share web content with their social media contacts; and Native File System API, which will read or save changes directly to files and folders on a device. Google also released new metrics, including Largest Contentful Paint (how quickly users see the most meaningful page content) and Cumulative Layout Shift (how the stability of a page allows users to read or interact with it).

“We believe that these metrics, chosen based on your individual use case, can provide a holistic view of real user experience to web developers,” Almaer said. “And as we look to reward developers who go the extra mile, we’re exploring ways to surface and highlight quality signals across Search and Chrome’s UI with speed as a core metrics. We’ll be sharing more in the coming months.”