Google’s 2017 Chrome Dev Summit took place last week in San Francisco. If you were lucky enough to make the trip, you experienced firsthand all the excitement a Chrome Dev Summit generates. If you were a mere mortal like myself, who tried to keep up to date with the livestream, you may have missed a few things. Not to worry though, we’ve put together a roundup of some of the exciting new announcements Google made at this year’s Chrome Dev Summit. Progressive Web Apps Were The Star Of The Show
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are nothing new to the Chrome Dev Summit. In fact, it’s where they were first introduced back in 2015. PWAs–because they are fast, reliable, engaging, and work offline–opened the floodgates to better user experiences across the web. Since 2015, PWAs have proven themselves invaluable as big name brands start to catch on. Take Trivago for example. As an early player in the PWA game, Trivago now has PWA experiences in 33 languages in 55 countries, and has seen a 150 percent increase in engagement for “Add to Home Screen” users and a 97 percent overall increase in conversions. These types of results have pushed many web browsers and the software behind smartphone brands like Apple and Android to support PWA technologies in full.The main theme running throughout the two-day event was using PWAs to improve both user experiences and web performance. The remarkable experiences PWAs offer to end users will continue to improve and enhance as the technology behind PWAs does the same. New APIs
Amid numerous exciting announcements, new application programming interfaces (APIs) were announced, allowing developers to easily add new features to their PWAs in the hopes of continuing to enhance the end-user experience. Here are a few new APIs that caught my eye:
Autofill:
Would you believe 9 billion form interactions are aided by Autofill, a new API that streamlines the form data entry experience? For Android users, Autofill can save up to 12 seconds while completing a form. Once a tedious process–especially on mobile–online forms are now made much easier with Autofill.
PayementRequest:
This new API simplifies web based payments by sharing saved credit card and shipping information quickly. The fashion brand, J.Crew, has already enabled PaymentRequest, and has seen a 75 percent decrease in checkout time as a result.
One-Tap Sign-In and One-Tap Sign-Up:
While these are two separate APIs, both share a similar goal: Allow end users who are already signed into their Google account to easily sign in and sign up with just one tap. As many websites require a sign-in or sign-up, this API eases a pain point for most users, especially those on mobile.
The Chrome User Experience Report
Another exciting announcement: The Chrome User Experience Report. The goal of the report is to provide real-world data regarding Chrome user experiences for 10,000 sites on mobile and desktop at varying connectivity speeds. Published to Google BigQuery, the report provides comparisons among websites, as well as macro trends across the web. Developers now have an easily digestible resource to use to see how they can continually improve end user experiences. The 2017 Chrome Dev Summit, as always, was full of helpful talks, interactive codelabs, and exciting announcements. With some new tools to keep in our back pocket, we’re excited to see how the evolution of PWAs continues to enhanceend-user experiences across the web. We’re excited to see what 2018 has in store, and we think it’s going to be an even bigger year for them than 2017 was.
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