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Chrome Developer Summit 2017 Summary - Day 2

Check out our summary of the Chrome Developer Summit 2017, Day 2.

Prosper Otemuyiwa

Former Auth0 Employee

Oct 25, 2017 • 10 min read

The second and final day of the fifth Chrome Developer Summit 2017 consisted of about nine talks and a Framework Panel. These talks were centered around VR, AR, Media, Polymer and developer tooling.

Tal Oppenheimer gave the opening talk titled The Web for the Entire World. She highlighted the top ten countries by internet usage. It's amazing China, India, and Nigeria are on that list.

Tal shared how many of the quickly growing countries still have data costs above 5% GNI. According to Tal, fifty-three percent of mobile connections will still be 2G in India in 2020. She talked about how PWA reduces the install size of an app and used the OLA service as a case study.

Check out her session on Youtube

Paul Irish and Eric Bidelman gave an amazing talk on Modern Tooling, Testing, and Automation. They uncovered new features in DevTools and unleashed Puppeteer, a new Node library for controlling headless Chrome. We have some awesome new features in Chrome DevTools. These features include:

  • CSS Grid Layout Inspection.
  • Color contrast evaluation.
  • Local Overrides - This feature actually blew my mind. Developers like myself have secretly wished over time that there should be a way to make changes to the HTML structure, CSS and JavaScript of a website and have those changes persist even if the browser is reloaded for the purpose of development. Local overrides takes care of that effectively. It allows you create a folder, and save these temporary changes to disk.
  • Performance Monitor to show live streaming metrics.
  • Filter Sidebar to enable filtering of errors in the console by user messages, errors, warnings and info.
  • Group Similar Checkbox to enable grouping of similar or repeating errors.
  • Top-level await in Console.
  • Storage Usage Summary for Progressive Web Apps. The Clear Storage section now provides a graphical allocation of storage used by a PWA.
  • Service Worker Upgrades - New Push and Sync feature in DevTools for the definition of custom payload in testing push notifications and background sync.

Paul talked about improvements made to Lighthouse. A year ago, Lighthouse had just about fifty key issues and metrics. Today, Lighthouse has over a hundred metrics. He also highlighted a new project called, Project Lantern, for critical path analysis and modeling.

Eric talked about Puppeteer. Puppeteer is a modern Node.js library for headless Chrome. It has many powers such as:

  • Intercepting network requests.
  • Running code in page.
  • Creating PDFs.

and so many others.

“Puppeteer is a modern Node.js library for headless Chrome.”

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Developers workflow just got better, all thanks to Chrome DevTools engineers!

Check out their session on Youtube.

Sam Saccone talked about The future of performance on the Web. Sam shared cutting-edge performance techniques and highlighted what the future of loading on the web may hold. Check out his session on Youtube.

Thomas Nattestad gave a talk titled V8 today and in the future. Thomas shared the work the V8 team has done to improve the performance of JavaScript on the browser. V8's mission is to speed up real-world performance for modern JavaScript and enable developers to build a faster future web. The V8 team pays attention to two major test suites, speedometer, and ares6. He mentioned that V8 is now twenty-two and forty percent faster on speedometer and ares6 respectively.

V8 just recently moved to a new architecture. The V8 Ignition, an interpreter, allows for fast startup and low memory consumption. Furthermore, the V8 TurboFan, an optimizing compiler, enables peak performance and max optimization. Thomas talked about how developers can now use ES2015+ without transpiling and still get optimal performance in the browser.

“The V8 Ignition, an interpreter, allows for fast startup and low memory consumption.”

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Check out his session on Youtube.

Alex Danilo and Deepti Gandluri talked about Real World Assembly. Web Assembly is a new capability for the web. It delivers a performant run-time to allow compiled languages such as C++ to be used in Web applications. Alex and Deepti demoed several real-world applications that leverage Web Assembly to run fast in the web browser. One of such applications is WebSight. WebSight was compiled to Wasm(Web Assembly) and witnessed significant performance gains. Construct3, an in-browser editor, is another application that combines the best of the web with the best of native. Worthy of note is Google Earth that leverages WASM runtime to give users a very good user experience.

Deepti highlighted a few things we should look out for in the future of Web Assembly:

  • Threads.
  • Improved support for debugging.
  • Garbage Collection.
  • Zero-cost Exception handling.

Check out their session on Youtube.

Taylor Savage, gave a talk on End-to-End Polymer Apps with the Modern Web Platform. Taylor extensively went through how the Polymer team envisions using web components, service workers and new web platform features to build great user experiences. Check out his session on Youtube.

Justin Fagnani gave a talk on lit-HTML. Justin talked about HTML templating and announced the release of lit-HTML. lit-HTML is a next-generation templating library that combines powerful web platform primitives such as JavaScript tagged template literals and HTML templates to help you build expressive templates for efficient DOM manipulation. Check out his session on Youtube.

Mat Scales talked about Creating Media on the Web. Mat covered some of the new web APIs that make media creation seamless. In his talk, the Instagram team showed how they built their PWA leveraging some new Web APIs. The Instagram team uses Workbox for precaching, WebGL and Shaka Player. Furthermore, they showed how the offline functionality was implemented.

Check out the session on Youtube.

Josh Carpenter and Brandon Jones talked about The Future of Immersive Experiences on the Web with VR and AR. They highlighted best practices for building immersive WebVR experiences that work on desktop, mobile and in VR headsets. They also talked about the future of augmented reality on the web. Check out their session on Youtube.

In between talks, there was a Framework Panel that consisted of Addy Osmani, Andrew Clark, Jason Miller, Steve Orvell, Rob Wormald, Tracy Lee, Chad Hietala, Sean Larkin, Malte Ubl, and Alex Russell. The audience asked several highly-engaging questions. Check out the answers given by the panel to the audience.

Aside: Authenticating with Auth0

The Credential Management API and One-tap API are both great and will allow users get a better user experience while signing in to apps. Now, the cool thing about automatic sign-in across devices is that it works with multiple login providers. This shows how you can federate with any provider. With Auth0 Centralized Login, you also have access to multiple authentication sources such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft Account, LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter, Box, Salesforce, amongst others, or enterprise identity systems like Windows Azure AD, Google Apps, Active Directory, ADFS or any SAML Identity Provider. Auth0 helps you to:

  • Add authentication through more traditional username/password databases.
  • Add support for linking different user accounts with the same user.
  • Support for generating signed JSON Web Tokens to call your APIs and flow the user identity securely.
  • Analytics of how, when and where users are logging in.
  • Pull data from other sources and add it to the user profile, through JavaScript rules.
  • Achieve SSO(Single Sign-On) seamlessly.
Sign up

for a free account today and enjoy fast, seamless, and hassle-free authentication in your apps.

Conclusion

Chrome Dev Summit, 2017 was a success. It was an amazing gathering of developers from all over the world. The talks were fantastic, the booth demos were intriguing and I can boldly say that the Chrome team did a great job in putting this conference together. Huge thanks to Kosamari and Monica, amazing MC's, for entertaining developers throughout the event. If you missed the first day of the summit, here is a recap.

Were you around for the summit? Did you attend sessions for both days? Let me know about your experiences in the comment section. 😃