For technical SEO practitioners and site developers, news from Google I/O

The announcements made by the Chrome team on the availability of technologies and extensions to their current products in the “What’s new for The Web Platform” presentation have a lot of value for technical SEO practitioners and site developers alike.

The Google Chrome Team made announcements on the availability of technologies in a session titled. “What’s new for The Web Platform” at Google I/O last week. It’s no surprise that the session’s two main speakers, Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, co-wrote an early book about AJAX and Web 2.0.

The Web Platform is made up of open web technologies that allow the web to act as a virtual operating system enabling browsers to deliver application-like experiences. As users have grown to expect from Google and others. Other key seminars, such as the “What’s new in Web Vitals” session, have been covered. We’ll go through key aspects from any session that pertains to SEO development.

Chromium

As a top Web browser, Google’s Chromium is more powerful than Chrome alone. It also runs Microsoft Edge and other programmes. Chrome’s browser market share lead over competitors is now comparable to Google Search’s lead over competitors. Internet Explorer is being phased out by Microsoft. Chrome has become the primary browser for which developers write code, with a fallback for unsupported features or a focus on technologies that are also supported by Safari and Firefox.

Safari is the only rival browser that isn’t in the single digits in terms of user market share, thanks to WebKit, which powers iOS’s in-app WebView. It’s worth noting that Google’s most recent development achievements, which were disclosed at Google I/O, coincide with unparalleled rises in browsing activity.

Coronavirus multi-market study (GlobalWebIndex) predicts strong growth in July 2020, a key milestone.

• Time spent on cell phones has increased by 70%.
• Laptop users spend 47% more time on them.
• On average, people spend 33% more time on their computers or desktops.

New security features

Security.

The first announcement from the Chrome team is a new security sandbox feature that isolates inline frame instances. That is, cross-site iframe> material embedded within a website, such as a YouTube widget, now operates as a distinct process from the process that handles the embedding page itself. Through V8 to Chrome, the isolation security architecture is meant to prevent data leakage from heart bleed and malicious JavaScript.

Cookies.

 Google also announced that the previously disclosed change to its default cookie handling behaviour for third-party website access is now available in Firefox. After previously being available only in Chrome and Edge. Unless you don’t access third-party cookies or provide third-party websites access to your own site’s cookies. If you haven’t heard about SameSite cookie requirements for operational third-party cookie access. Now is the time to find out. The browser handling behaviour is governed by SameSite directives.

APIs.

Given the widespread usage of third-party cookies, the Chrome Team unveiled a new “family of APIs” including federated login, tailored advertisements, and conversion tracking that can enable alternative paths for use cases that previously required the usage of a third-party cookie. For example, the “Attribution Reporting” API proposal would shift conversion monitoring from cookies monitoring visitors across websites to the browser itself.

Tracking prevention.

Transmissions from the Attribution Reporting API contain time delays and noise to prevent trackers from linking together personally identifying data with conversion event timing. Making it difficult for anyone to successfully trace specific users and conversions that way. The API, along with a few other APIs, are accessible in origin trials. Which you may use to test with your own website before they go live.

New progressive web app features

Context menu and badges.

Progressive web apps now allow you to develop “shortcuts” that expose “fast actions” as context menu items (right-click or two-finger tap) with supporting operating systems such as Android, Chrome OS, Windows, and macOS once they’ve been installed with an icon on home screens and desktops. A new Badging API also allows you to add a notification number to your app’s icon.

Declarative Link Capturing.

The origin trial version of a proposed “Decorative Link Capturing” API will be available soon. The proposed API allows links from outside the PWA context to open the PWA. Similar to how clicking a link to a YouTube video URL opens an installed YouTube app. Rather than a browser tab with the YouTube website. This is similar to deep-linking but in an app context.

The manifest file.

Chrome on desktop and Android web app installation user interfaces are receiving snazzy new dialogues and information panels to provide users more information and guidance to make the process go more smoothly. Custom text and graphics can be specified in the manifest file of a web app by developers.

Multi-Screen Window Placement API.

This new API allows progressive web programmes to find and adjust the location of the window on all connected monitors. This functionality is said to be useful for web-based presentations and video conferencing. These trends, once again, are in line with the substantial increases in browsing activity that will begin in 2020.

File System Access API.

Finally, online programmes now have access to the user’s file system. What could possibly go wrong? You’ll be able to deal with existing files and save state to disc using your app. A new File Handling API allows you to register your web app as a file type handler. Allowing users to open files and have them handled by your web app, exactly like a native app. Later this year, an experimental release will be available.

At least theoretically, the Web Platform is quickly becoming the “web as operating system,” with application-like experiences as envisioned. Expect early encounters to be a little strange, with a steep developer learning curve and a lot of effort to put in place. However, these are exciting times for web developers who want to experiment with cutting-edge web technologies.

Web Assembly news

Web Assembly (Wasm) promises to compile code into binary executables that can be run in JavaScript engines. Performance difficulties, one of the most common concerns, maybe improved now that V8 supports contemporary CPUs with SIMD instructions for better multimedia performance.

Wasm’s best feature is that it allows you to develop web apps in nearly any language, not just JavaScript, by compiling down to the binary specification. There are some notable Rust projects, for example. It builds to JavaScript binaries that can be run in current browsers. Knowing what you’re limited to when using a language like Rust. On the other hand, is crucial for staying within the Wasm standard.

Core Web Vitals

The most significant Core Web Vitals announcement is that performance gains from enhancing web vitals will benefit both mobile and desktop rankings later this year. It was always strange to believe that damaged rankings would simply apply to mobile searches, given that PC users often surf under sporadic network conditions.

Rankings.

We’ve gotten some clarification on lab test results. The rankings will be adjusted based on the data collected in the field. Lighthouse is “calibrated to be indicative of a user in your high percentiles,” which is good news. That means that if you get good lab results, users in the field will, nine times out of ten, send Google even better results for your User Experience ranking factor adjustment.

Background images.

It’s been difficult to figure out what your Largest Contentful Paint element is. Lighthouse will soon give you a thumbnail and will be updated for better accuracy. When dealing with backgrounds and carousel pictures, thankfully.

Layout shifting.

Changes to how Cumulative Layout Shift is calculated are another nagging issue that is being addressed. It was the case that the shifting accumulated during the course of the page browsing session. Because some users load and leave while others explore and scroll up and down. The score did not indicate the level of precision required to account for a change in your rankings as a result. Google now takes a 5-second sample and adds it up to get the highest shift score.

Content visibility.

With the value set to auto, the relatively new content-visibility CSS attribute can now be used to boost performance ratings. This allows the browser to forego rendering the contents of that element if it isn’t currently visible in the user’s display. Resulting in greater performance when compared to the quantity of material in those elements.

Prerendering.

While several browsers have implemented prerendering capabilities, allowing developers to signal URLs in, say, your top navigation to be stored in the browser cache for quick loading on the click, there are some issues with cross-site security, multimedia that may suddenly playback, and even unintentionally logging users out of authentication. Later this year, Google expects to release an updated prerendering API.

Why we care

There are a number of things to look forward to from Google as it expands browser and API support for Web Platform technologies. Many of these technologies are already available, and several of these announcements state that more will be accessible this year. All of the updates discussed here will either help you improve your rankings or give you new methods to engage your site’s visitors.

Don’t forget to join up for our SEO for Developers Workshop at SMX Advanced on June 15th and 16th. As well as our workshops on June 17th and 18th, to stay up with the rapid pace of these changes in website construction, web app authoring, and technical SEO work for rankings!

 

 

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