I imagine the millions of dollars Google pours into these projects and I think, just a fraction of that budget could be spent making sure framework users have an easy on-ramp to all of the good stuff coming to the web.

Google has done stellar work on Service Workers, Web Components, HTTP2 and more, and I want nothing more than to get those features into as many web apps as possible. Here’s what I think Google could do to improve the real-world experience of writing a web app in 2016.

Embrace Community Frameworks

I would love to see the Chrome team offer a full-throated endorsement of frameworks. Instead of a tepid “Yes, frameworks exist. Some people like them. But have you considered Using the Platform?,” acknowledge the benefits of frameworks and help people understand how to use them effectively.

One of the highlights for me from this year’s Google I/O was Addy Osmani’s Progressive Web Apps across all frameworks talk. In it, Addy delved into how users of Ember, React and Angular can start taking advantage of Service Worker today. He highlighted addons that make integration as simple as a single npm install. You’re left thinking, “Wow, this is awesome, I can add it to my app right now.”

But it’s more than that. Addy has been proactive in reaching out to us, asking how he can help us adopt PWA techniques, and listening to our concerns. In my opinion, Addy should be a role model for how browser vendors do community outreach. I would love if he had more resources to work on this.

My hope is that 2017’s Google I/O Chrome keynote closes by saying, “We’ve seen a lot of cool new stuff today, and we’re excited to tell you we’ve been working closely with the open source frameworks you already use to make it easy to adopt today.”

Prioritize Framework Performance

As it was put to me, “the V8 team has focused first and foremost on being fast for fast code and only secondarily on speed for code that chooses to use slow patterns.”

This is an absolutely noble goal, but the reality is that most JavaScript is not written like C; real world JavaScript tends to be very dynamic. Incredibly subtle changes can impact performance by an order of magnitude or more. It’s impossible to reason about; you’d have to audit each change in low-level tools like IRHydra by hand, which is to say, performance regressions are common.

The proof is in the pudding: whatever the microbenchmarks say, when it comes to real world applications, other JavaScript engines tend to perform better than V8. It’s no accident; they include representative framework apps in their performance test suites.

I would love to see V8 incorporate benchmarks of large Ember, Angular and React apps in their performance suite. A JavaScript engine must be optimized for the code that exists, not the code you wish existed. It’s not okay to say “You’re slow on Chrome because you wrote slow code, rewrite your framework” when performance is so much better on other browsers.

Contribute Directly

All of the popular web frameworks are open source and have vibrant communities around them. There are people whose dream job would be working for Google to bring the latest and greatest web technologies to the framework they love.

Use some of the budget to hire a few core contributors whose full-time job is making the default Ember CLI, create-react-app or ng-cli experience PRPL- and PWA-compatible. Default behavior counts for a lot. Developers have a cognitive budget just like everyone, and they’ve been told to develop accessibility-first, mobile-first, test-first, and more.

What if instead of trying to stand out in the avalanche of advice developers are overwhelmed with, you could get them to do the right thing just by using a tool they already know?

Secure-by-default is a principle the Chrome security team has adopted, because they know it’s not realistic to be able to educate every user about always-evolving security best practices.

For similar reasons, I would love to see Chrome adopt fast-by-default as a principle, going to where developers are today and making sure the tools they already know how to use do the right thing, automatically.

Whether we think they’re smart enough or not, developers of all stripes are going to be writing more web apps, not fewer. Let’s challenge ourselves to build tools that help everyone create fast web apps by default. I’m eager to do my part. Chrome dedicating resources to work directly on popular frameworks would be an incredibly high-impact way to improve the performance of today’s web apps for a very small investment.

Being directly involved with frameworks is also a great way to improve the standards process. Having Googlers embedded in outside communities allows the folks designing new platform features to get rapid feedback from a diverse set of communities, not just internal Google projects. Having diverse, first-hand knowledge of how new features are being used will help mitigate against blindspots and catch design flaws earlier, when they’re easier to fix.