Are there any new or upcoming browser APIs you are keeping an eye on?

Comments

[Ben Halpern]

I've been playing with loading="lazy"

If you enable "lazy loading" in chrome://flags, your DEV browsing experience will be moderately more efficient 😄

Ben Halpern ・ May 9 '19

#webdev #webperf #chrome #html

[Norman]

This is one of the very useful upcoming features in my opinion. All those semi magic lazy loading scripts are soon a thing of the past. The browser is anyways much better suited to make this decision (eg for deciding if content should be pre or lazy loaded or just simply together with the rest)

[Josh Pullen]

Portals have caught my eye as an interesting restructuring of the internet:

It seems like we're moving away from an internet which is organized by domain and more toward one which is organized by topic. This is, of course, ideal for Google, who has been leading the effort, which will probably make it pretty controversial.

Personally, I think this change in organization makes sense. But I want to know: What do you think of it?

[Ben Halpern]

Yeah, exciting. But also concerning if it becomes a Chrome-only thing. What’s the latest on outlook for other browsers?

[Josh Pullen]

Not good, as far as I can discern. Chrome's incredibly fast pace and willingness to change the standards definitely echos the IE days, which is scary.

Even though each feature on its own seems like mostly a good idea, if other browsers fall behind we could be in some trouble down the road.

[Meghan (she/her)]

Yet another feature that should've been developed as an importable library and not native to a browser.

[Phil Nash]

I actually think that Portals couldn't be developed as a library. Otherwise Google would have done to use with AMP articles in the search carousel. Promoting an iframe to be the top level content in a smooth manner is not something you can just do with JavaScript, which is why they are adding this to the standard.

[Meghan (she/her)]

I see it now, after reading web.dev/hands-on-portals/ and hope this can come to other engines soon :D

[lepinekong]

interesting, I was looking for something like that, thanks.

[Norman]

I'm very concerned about this feature. It's very clearly something that helps ad-tech by allowing communication between the host and the embedded pages.

Of course it also allows for a lot of great features by enabling interactive embedded content. But I'm very careful with this and I'm pretty sure looking for a plugin that protects me from all the new possible advertising.

[Jochem Stoel]

WebGPU is the working name for a future web standard and JavaScript API for accelerated graphics and compute, aiming to provide "modern 3D graphics and computation capabilities". It is developed in the W3C GPU for the Web Community Group with engineers from Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and others.

[Stephen Belovarich]

Form associated custom elements. A much needed addition to custom elements spec that make handling form elements easier.

Spec: html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/cus...

[Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦]

This is a specific case of the element internals API proposal which will also give us control over things like the a11y object model. Exciting stuff.

[Kognise]

I've been keeping an eye on Houdini.

[Pavel Evstigneev]

Webauthn. Already support fingerprint scanner in chrome, other browsers support only hardware key for now. Will be great addition to simplify login process

[Massimo Artizzu]

Portals, Houdini, import maps and loaders... There's tons of exciting stuff in the future 🤩

[Jaime Rios]

Hi, Ben.

Yes, there are two of them:

1. The Payment Request API. For me this is a huge step forward for eCommerce. I had the opportunity of developing most of the checkout on modelorama.com.mx and this API removes a lot of friction for consumers. Support is almost there:
   caniuse.com/#search=payment

2. Intersection observer API. It is already standard and it really helps to make websites faster.

[Maniflames]

The Shape Detection API! It allows for detecting & scanning barcodes, text and faces (that last one is kinda creepy though😅). At first I was very afraid it was just a chrome thing because they're the only one with an available trial but there is a spec for it so we'll just have to see how other browsers respond...

The main reason I keep my eye on this is because you won't need to depend on libraries and external api's anymore. In a world where users are getting used to features like these on their phone an the web feels like a logical next step. (Definitely worried about security and privacy though).

[Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦]

Template Instantiation will provide another piece of the puzzle for web components.

Imagine something like this fake pseudocode without framework or library dependencies

<template id="user-tpl" type="repeat">
  <li>
    <article>
      <h1>{{name}}</h1>
      <img src="{{picture}}" alt="{{alt}}"/>
      <p>{{description}}</p>
    </article>
  </li>
<template>

document.getElementById{"user-tpl")
  .instantiate(users, someUl)

See github.com/w3c/webcomponents/blob/... for real examples.

[Meghan (she/her)]

Amazing! Been waiting for this.