Google announces Trusted Web Activities letting apps open full screen activities with Chrome web content

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At the Chrome Dev Summit, Google today announced two things—Trusted Web Activities and the Chrome User Experience Report. Trusted Web Activities are an interesting concept and should allow a greater user experience in certain applications, while the Chrome User Experience Report can be used by developers to get an idea of how client machines using Google Chrome perform on websites.

Trusted Web Activities are full screen Android app activities with web content rendered by Chrome itself. This means that developers can leverage the installed Google Chrome web renderer to power certain content entirely from the web in their apps. This will be included in Chrome’s canary and developer channels soon, with APIs provided by an Android support library. This feature will also be opened up to other browsers if they wish to be used for application rendering as well.

The Chrome User Experience Report is a public dataset of user experiences metrics for top websites on the Internet. It includes performance data from real world conditions compiled from Chrome users with “usage statistics reporting” enabled. This dataset will initially launch with a sample of ten thousand sets of data and will largely focus on loading metrics. If developers wish to access it, they can find out how through Google’s documentation.

This information can allow developers to improve their websites, seeing how real Google Chrome users experience websites on a day to day basis. This can then be used to improve websites, and again see how performance metrics change.

Google’s approach to working with developers and offering statistics and new methods of rendering content will potentially allow for a better user experience in the future. Developers can offload processing to Google Chrome (or other browsers) on Android, and web developers can also see where users may see problems with websites—particularly when loading them—and go about making a solution.