Chromium Blog

Exploring the Physical Web with Chrome for iOS

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Today’s connected world is full of opportunities for people to digitally interact with their surroundings on the fly. For example, smart parking meters let users pay through the cloud. But for developers, it’s often difficult to build contextual experiences that people can easily access. Even with the prevalence of smartphones, users are reluctant to install an app or even type a URL while on the go.
The Physical Web is an open source approach to help you build contextual interactions that people can discover and use with less friction. A few months ago, Chrome for iOS added a Today widget to let users open a new tab or do a voice search right from the Notification Center. The new Chrome for iOS integrates the Physical Web into the Chrome Today widget, enabling users to access an on-demand list of web content that is relevant to their surroundings.

It’s easy to make your content discoverable via the Physical Web using Eddystone, an open Bluetooth Low Energy beacon format announced last week. Eddystone supports multiple frame types for different use cases. The Physical Web displays content that is broadcasted using Eddystone-URL, the beacon frame type designed to convey compressed URLs. You can add your content to the Physical Web by simply configuring a beacon that supports Eddystone-URL to transmit your URL of choice.
When users who have enabled the Physical Web open the Today view, the Chrome widget scans for broadcasted URLs and displays these results, using estimated proximity of the beacons to rank the content. You can learn more about the types of user experiences that the Physical Web enables by visiting our cookbook and joining the open source community on GitHub.
The new Chrome for iOS is an early exploration in enabling users to access the Physical Web in their day-to-day mobile experiences. As the ecosystem grows, we’ll continue to explore new ways to bring the Physical Web to users’ fingertips. We’re looking forward to seeing the new contextual experiences you’ll build.
Posted by Jake Leichtling, Physical Web Explorer

Revving up JavaScript performance with TurboFan

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

The JavaScript ecosystem is evolving in several promising ways. There have been mainstream standards advancements like the recent approval of ECMAScript 2015, as well as early-stage experiments like Strong Mode, to name a few. Balancing the needs of these new directions demands a flexible just-in-time compiler, and we've been hard at work on a brand new compiler for V8, codenamed "TurboFan." Since Chrome 41, TurboFan has been enabled for certain types of code, speeding up traditional content as well as improving performance for new language features.
TurboFan was built from the ground up with many unique capabilities in mind. It optimizes more code than the previous optimizing compiler, supports flexible and dynamic optimization modes, and enables easier contributions and maintenance. Thanks to these features and more, we've turned on TurboFan for some types of code that were challenging for our previous compiler to optimize, such as asm.js, class literals, with scopes, computed property names and for-of loops. TurboFan already shows promising performance results, including a 29% increase on the zlib score of the Octane benchmark.

Over the coming months, we expect to enable TurboFan for more and more types of JavaScript, with the eventual goal of entirely replacing our existing CrankShaft compiler. As it rolls out, developers' code will automatically get these free speedups with no changes needed. Stay tuned for future progress. Posted by Ben L. Titzer, Software Engineer and TurboFan Mechanic

File System Provider API for easier file management

Thursday, June 11, 2015

On Chrome OS, users should be able to work with files in the cloud as easily as they work with local files. Today, users often have their files spread all over the cloud -- with documents in one place, their photos in another, and videos somewhere else. Working across all of those systems can be a challenge, which is where the File System Provider API in Chrome OS can help. With the File System Provider API, users who install your Chrome App can have your Cloud service seamlessly integrated into the Chrome OS Files app. Working with multiple storage backends becomes as easy as dragging and dropping files locally.
As usual, users can install your Chrome app or extension from the Chrome Web Store. Or, they can add new services directly from the Files app. The new file system will then appear directly in the left navigation column. Users can browse this file system anywhere the Files app is shown, including Save as and Open dialogs.
Screenshot 2015-04-29 at 12.36.48 PM.png

Screenshot 2015-04-29 at 12.36.48 PM.png

Your extension just needs to call chrome.fileSystemProvider.mount and respond to the listed events. Developers have already created some great apps, including the Box.com official client, an SMB client, and even a way to browse TED talks locally. Check out the documentation or join the mailing list to stay informed about announcements and API changes.
Posted by Tomasz Mikolajewski, Filesystem Fiend

Chrome 44 Beta: Improvements to Notifications API and promoted add to homescreen

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

The newest Chrome Beta channel release includes new ES6 features and a number of updates to existing APIs. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS. Improved notification capabilities Chrome 42 allowed users to opt in to receive push notifications from sites even after the page is closed. Sites may now use getNotifications to observe which of their notifications are still being displayed, and Notification.data to store a payload with a notification so they can determine which notification was clicked. Promoted add to homescreen improvements Since Chrome 42, users who frequently visited a high-quality web app on Android saw a banner allowing them to add the site to their home screen in one tap. In this release Chrome fires a cancellable beforeinstallprompt event before the banner is shown, allowing developers to measure user interaction with the feature. Developers are also now able to offer the banner for their native Android app. ES6 computed property names Until now, developers defining a JavaScript object literal needed to know the names of all of its properties before runtime. This release increase the expressiveness of the object literal syntax by providing support for ES6 computed property names, allowing developers to put an expression in brackets [], to be computed as the property name at runtime.
let propertyName = "foo"; let obj = { [propertyName + "IsTrue"]: true, contains: 12 };
Other updates in this release

Chrome’s implementation of the Push API has undergone several minor breaking changes in order to keep up to date with the evolving specification.

ES6 extended Unicode escape sequences allow developers to use the extended set of Unicode characters in JavaScript string literals, where previously characters whose escape sequences contain more than four hexadecimal values were unable to be denoted.

This release includes a new implementation of multi-column layout by Opera engineer Morten Stenshorne, solving historic issues with incorrect column balancing.

Developers should now use the scroll attributes of document.scrollingElement instead of document.body as the latter has several well known issues.

As always, visit chromestatus.com/features for a complete overview of Chrome’s developer features, and circle +Google Chrome Developers for more frequent updates.
Posted by Peter Beverloo, Software Engineer and Notification Newsmaker

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

Continuing to protect Chrome users from malicious extensions

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

We’re always working to improve Chrome extensions while keeping our users as safe as possible. In May 2014 we announced a new policy to protect Windows users by enforcing that extensions be hosted on the Chrome Web Store. The results were encouraging: we saw a 75% drop in customer support help requests for uninstalling unwanted extensions. Consequently, we will expand the reach of this protection to all Windows and Mac users in the coming months.

We originally did not enforce this policy on the Windows developer channel in order to allow developers to opt out. Unfortunately, we’ve since observed malicious software forcing users into the developer channel in order to install unwanted off-store extensions. Affected users are left with malicious extensions running on a Chrome channel they did not choose. As such, starting today we will begin enforcing this policy on all Windows channels. Mac will soon follow, with enforcement for all channels beginning in July 2015.

For developers, we’ll continue to support local extension installs during development as well as installs via Enterprise policy. To provide an integrated install flow from your own website, you can make use of the existing inline installation feature. If you run into problems or think an extension was disabled incorrectly, please reach out to us in our support forums. If you’ve developed an extension not yet in the Chrome Web Store, we encourage you to submit it today.

The extension platform unlocks powerful features that can help users get the most out of Chrome. However, it is crucial that our users stay safe from the reaches of malicious software developers. Extending this protection is one more step to ensure that users of Chrome can enjoy all the web has to offer without the need to worry as they browse.

Posted by Jake Leichtling, Extensions Platform Product Manager

Scheduling tasks intelligently for optimized performance

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Earlier this month, Chrome began utilizing new techniques to get pages in front of users faster. That's an important piece of the performance story, but it's just one - what about once the page has loaded fully? That's when users want pages to animate smoothly and react quickly to their scrolls and clicks. Chrome 41 included a task scheduler for Chrome's rendering engine that ensures those high-priority tasks are handled immediately, making Chrome feel snappier and run closer to a smooth 60 frames per second.
Given that ambitious goal, Chrome has just milliseconds to produce every frame. But painting graphics to the screen isn't all that Chrome does, and there can be several different tasks contending for a single processor core. Historically Chrome handled execution of tasks, such as animating an image, responding to a click, or doing some memory operations, the same way that a bank handles a queue of customers: the first one line in is the first one handled. While this is simple and straightforward, it's not always the best for optimal performance. An urgent task, such as painting the next frame to the screen, might be added to the end of a long queue of pending tasks. The 60 frames per second goal would be lost.

Starting in Chrome 41, we've created a task scheduler integrated into the Blink rendering engine. The scheduler is capable of evaluating pending tasks and reordering them so that the most urgent tasks, such as animating and responding to a user's action, are prioritized ahead of others. Lower priority tasks, such as clearing out unused memory, are delayed until the processor has available time. In practice, this results in up to a 40% higher responsiveness to user input when Chrome is working hard to draw frames.

However, even the most advanced scheduler can't properly queue up tasks without knowing what's coming in the future. To address this, the Blink scheduler is also integrated with Chrome's graphics engine, which has precise knowledge of when Chrome will need to deprioritize other tasks in order to paint graphics to the screen. This allows the scheduler to consider lower priority tasks and schedule only those tasks that fit nicely into the otherwise "idle" time before Chrome needs to draw another frame. These tasks are handled essentially for free, with no impact on the smooth, 60 frames-per-second animations.
The latest version of Chrome scrolling a particularly challenging website, with the scheduler enabled (left) and disabled (right).
These changes demonstrate that performance isn't just about doing things faster - it's also about doing things smarter, in the right order, and at the right time. Stay tuned for more updates about how we're using Chrome's scheduler to push the bounds of performance. Posted by Sami Kyostila and Ross McIlroy, Senior Task Masters