I spent the past two days at the Chrome Developer Summit in Mountain View. While the entire event was livestreamed and is now on YouTube, I thought it might be useful to talk a bit about where things seem to be going, at least from my perspective on Google’s perspective.
Without a doubt, the biggest public goal of the Chrome team can be described as “making mobile web better.” Making Chrome (in general but particularly on mobile) faster, more capable, and supporting apps that are well-designed and generally and more “appy.”
Which makes total sense. Web on the desktop is already pretty awesome, and getting awesome-er. And, as Sundar Pichai mentioned in the day one closing keynote, mobile is the first computing platform that’s going to reach a majority of the human beings on the planet. That’s not a small deal.
There are three main places web apps can suffer relative to their native cousins on mobile platforms: performance, capability, and distribution. Google is putting huge efforts into addressing the first two (I’ll get to the third later).