The web celebrated its 30th anniversary this year, and what an amazing three decades they have been. We’ve seen the platform go from powering simple hypertext documents, to one that enables rich, immersive, and dynamic experiences that are at the forefront of design.

Looking forward, the world’s needs continue to evolve, and that motivates us to continue our participation with the global web community to adapt and improve the platform to meet the needs of the future. Our efforts are focused on making the web faster and more powerful, while keeping our users’ trust and safety front and center.

Vision for an Instant Web

Speed matters on the web. We’ve found that users are highly sensitive to loading speed and this can have a direct impact on the business.

So we’ve been working hard to make the browser faster and lighter so developers can do more with their experience. By focusing on startup bottlenecks, we were able to improve the loading speed on Chrome’s startup by 50% on low-end devices; and 10% across devices. We also improved scrolling performance by 18% and through V8, JavaScript memory usage reduced by up to 20% for real world apps.

Apart from making the browser more efficient, we’ve also been adding more features to the platform to take the burden away from developers. And we’d like to share a few of these here:

• To deliver a great image loading experience without needing developers to build their own JavaScript solutions, we’re bringing lazy loading for images and iframes directly into the browser. All developers have to do is add a simple HTML attribute and Chrome will take care of the rest.
• For fast sites, Chrome’s eager clearing of the page, when a user wants to navigate to another page, can be detrimental to the experience. To avoid this flash of a white “loading page”, we’re rolling out a new experiment called Paint Holding to improve navigation on the web. You can see it in action for the Awwwards website here: 

Speaking of navigations, Portals, is a new technology that we believe will fundamentally change the way users traverse the web. Portals are similar to iframes and allow content to be embedded directly in a page, but unlike standard iframes, they can be ‘activated’ to become the top-level page, enabling instant transitions across the web. Advanced experiences can even hold pieces of the original page’s UI privately and securely, so that you can provide seamless overlays that still hold our ideals of the origin model.

At I/O, we shared our vision of how developers would be able to use Portals and associated APIs to support pre-fetching, enhanced transitions and the exchange of contextual information between sites. And now that Portals API is available behind a flag in Chrome Canary, we’re excited to see what developers will build with this new primitive.
Another technology that we’re particularly excited about is Web Packaging, a bold new contract between web developers and web servers. With Web Packaging, the model for loading pages changes from the browser requesting the page from the origin’s server to it being able to load from anywhere — even potentially other peer devices.


This gives the browser the flexibility to preload content and load pages instantly while doing so in a privacy preserving way. Signed Exchanges, the first phase of this vision is now available in Chrome for developers to use.

These are some of the things that we’re doing to make the web more instant, but its success is predicated on developers making their experiences fast and maintaining that performance. So we’ve added a bunch of tools to help.

In 2017, we launched the Chrome UX report to give developers a better sense of how their users truly experience their webpages by providing them real world metrics. The report is now includes a data set of nearly 6 million origins and is powering more of our tools, including the latest Speed Report in the Google Search Console. The report is currently in beta and you can register here to join the program and share your feedback.

To give developers an even wider array of real world metrics, the Firebase team have broadened their Performance Monitoring tool to also cover web apps.

And to stay on the rails for performance, we’ve seen many top sites implement ‘performance budgets’ within their build environments, and that is why we’ve built performance budgets directly into Lighthouse, so that you can get alerted to performance regressions before they hit your production site.

Creating a more powerful web

Our vision is to allow you to do absolutely anything that you want your users to do, on the web. So we’ve been working hard over the last year to close the capability gap by focusing on the features that get your experiences closer to your users.