3 years ago

Category: Security, Privacy, Microsoft, android, ios, apple

While much of the event focused on the Chrome browser’s continued improvements to performance, security and privacy — which were positioned as three key pillars — it also became clear that Google is making good progress expanding the web’s capabilities too, particularly with modern cloud apps like Google Meet and Stadia, the continued growth in third-party browser extensions, and the state-of-the-art experiments happening with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Ever since the launch of Apple and Android app stores in 2008, native apps on iOS and Android have siphoned off attention from the web platform. But as Google engineer Alex Russell explained in the final keynote of the Summit on Day 2, the web is a “meta-platform” that is gradually catching up to native apps in capability.

But 250,000 available extensions is nothing to sneeze at, so it’s positive news for the web that Chrome Extensions is a growing platform.

McLachlan listed some of the functionality now viable in a web application, which previously had been mostly the domain of native apps: While expanding web capabilities via PWAs and extensions were perhaps the most intriguing things to come out of this year’s Chrome Dev Summit, I was also impressed by the various technical enhancements that have been made in the Chrome environment over the past year.