Happy new year!
I thought I would note down some of the things that I am excited about for the web and that I hope to be writing a bit more about over the coming weeks and months. This is just a super quick list and isn't based on any sort of priority.
- Web Assembly
- All browsers shipping within the year. It opens up a lot of interesting possibilities on the web, especially with bringing more native libraries to the web (FFMPEG for example)
- Web Components
- Majority of browsers shipping all the required requisite components (Shadow DOM, Templates, Custom Elements)
- A less lumpy web with more consistency across browsers to help reduce developer pain and frustration.
- Meta platforms become a more known entity and as an industry we have parts of a plan on how to build for them.
- Browser vendors are doing even more developer outreach - I am looking forward to the non-western browser vendors doing even more in this space.
- Progressive enhancement and Accessibility seem to have been gaining ground a little more (although Google Trends suggests otherwise). I am excited to see this trend continue and become more important for users and developers.
- A more consistent and prescriptive Media story across platforms
- How to encode video and audio effectively
- How to build a next gen media player site
- How the future of media on the web will work.
- Enhanced Media APIs come to the platform
- getUserMedia everywhere and WebRTC everywhere
- Media Session API
- Web VR - more experiments and exploring where it can go
- Image Capture API and advanced APIs
- Even more CSS primitives — CSS Grid is ever so close!
- This is the year that everyone migrates from Flash.
- Headless Chrome lands letting us run more of the browser on the server and building interesting services on top of that. It will start off with more web hosted developer tools and then in to more services once people realise how easy it is.
- Headless Web becomes even more of a thing.
- Smooth payment, sign-up and sign-in services across the web (HT Peter Gasston for reminding me)
- Increased Service Worker adoption
- More robust sites that work instantly on first load and work all the times even when offline.
- Better Push Notification integrations
- Better large download support
- Tighter integration with the host platform when developers and users want it.
- Generic Sensor API giving us more consistent access to sensors on the users device
- Great apps that use BLE and more adoption of that API
- Fully installable Web Apps
- Sharing API allowing me to share to native apps
- Share receiver API allowing my web app to be shared to from native apps
- Really hitting home the benefits of the web to people, businesses and developers.
- SSL Everywhere (and more) with businesses and developers prioritizing security.
- A focus on strong UX on the web and Performance and the industry prioritizing this.
- The web reaching more people as they come online with Mobile. There is still a huge amount of potential and growth in India, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, all of Africa. You name it, mobile is growing massively still and the web is accessible on all of these devices.
I am incredibly excited for 2017 and I am going to keep updating this post. What are you excited about with the web?
I lead the Chrome Developer Relations team at Google.
We want people to have the best experience possible on the web without having to install a native app or produce content in a walled garden.
Our team tries to make it easier for developers to build on the web by supporting every Chrome release, creating great content to support developers on web.dev, contributing to MDN, helping to improve browser compatibility, and some of the best developer tools like Lighthouse, Workbox, Squoosh to name just a few.
I love to learn about what you are building, and how I can help with Chrome or Web development in general, so if you want to chat with me directly, please feel free to book a consultation.
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