Chromium Blog: I/O 2015: The Mobile Web Roundup

Chromium Blog

News and developments from the open source browser project

I/O 2015: The Mobile Web Roundup

Friday, May 29, 2015

We talked about the power of the mobile web during the Google I/O keynote yesterday. The mobile web reaches far and wide and is great at connecting users with content, since it’s so easy to go from one page to the next. In fact, the average Chrome for Android user navigates to more than 100 domains per month.

The mobile web is an excellent way to build a successful business, and we want to help you do it in three ways; develop your content, engage new users, and monetize your work.

Develop Mobile web development can be complicated, but we don’t think it should be. Yesterday, we announced Polymer 1.0, a new way to build web applications. In addition to this first production-ready release for the web components library, we released brand-new sets of elements built with Polymer that range from toolbars and menus to offline caching and mobile-first checkout flows. When you visit Polymer’s new element catalog, you can check out documentation, play with demos, and download elements. And if you're new to the platform, you can check out our starter kit. Packed with the latest features, the starter kit works out of the box so you can focus on adding features right away.
Engage

Having many users discover your site is great, but you also want them to be able to build a meaningful relationship with it. We're bringing some of the most compelling capabilities from native apps to sites in a way that maintains what's great about the web with push notifications and add-to-homescreen buttons. This allows your users to interact more deeply with your content.

Push Notifications

Earn Purchases today involve a checkout form, and forms can be the deciding factor for whether someone makes a purchase on your site. Autofill helps users complete forms up to 30% faster, so we’re expanding our support with credit cards and addresses from Google Payments. This means that the same information that’s used to make purchases inside the Google Play store can now be applied to websites. By using the standard autocomplete attributes, you can make the checkout process easier by having Chrome autofill your forms with 100% accuracy. Just tell us what the field is and we'll fill it in -- no guessing.

What’s NextOne of our next big hurdles is improving the transition between mobile apps and the mobile web.

Native app developers often face a tough choice when a user taps a URL in their app: they can send users to a browser - interrupting the user experience, or they can build their own in-app browser with WebViews - resulting in a lot of work for only a basic browsing experience.
We talked about Pinterest being an early adopter during our keynote; another good example is an app like Twitter that helps users find and share great web content. Users frequently move between native and web content in the app, so giving them a seamless experience is key. Users also want to easily take actions specific to Twitter, like retweeting or sending links in direct messages, which aren’t options in a typical browser.

In this week's Chrome dev channel we're introducing Chrome custom tabs, a new way for native apps to control their web experience without having to resort to a webview. You can change color schemes, animations, and add custom actions to the toolbar, while giving users a full browsing experience with their cookies, saved passwords, and features like Data Saver and Google Translate.

Chrome is committed to making sure that you can develop easily, engage with your users, and build a thriving business around the web. For the latest news and upcoming developer events, subscribe to this blog and follow us on Twitter@ChromiumDev.

Posted by Rahul Roy-chowdhury, Chief Web Fanboy and Product Manager