The web is an amazing platform, it reaches users all around the world - on essentially any device. It’s easy to use, and easy to share. There’s nothing to install. But most importantly, it’s an open-ecosystem that anyone can use or build on.
There are some apps that are not possible to build and deliver on the open web today. We call this, the app gap. The gap between what’s possible on the web and what’s possible on native. We want to close that gap. We believe web apps should be able to do anything native apps can.
Through our capabilities project, we want to make it possible for web apps to do anything native apps can, by exposing the capabilities of native platforms to the web platform, while maintaining user security, privacy, trust, and other core tenets of the web.
The new capabilities
You can see the full list of capabilities we're
considering on crbug.com and filtering issues with the
proj-fugu label.
Capabilities in flight
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Badging API |
The Badging API is a new web platform API that allows installed web
apps to set an application-wide badge, shown in an
operating-system-specific place associated with the application, such
as the shelf or home screen. Badging makes it easy to subtly notify
the user that there is some new activity that might require their
attention, or it can be used to indicate a small amount of information,
such as an unread count.
Current Status: Available as an origin trial. Last Updated: March 12th, 2019 |
| Contact Picker API |
The Contact Picker API is a new, on-demand picker that allows users to
select entries from their contact list and share limited details of
the selected entries with a website. It allows users to share only
what they want, when they want, and makes it easier for users to
reach and connect with their friends and family.
Current Status: Origin trial starts in Chrome 77. Last Updated: August 7th, 2019 |
| Get Installed Related Apps API |
The Get Installed Related Apps API is a new web platform API
that allows your web app to check to see if your native app is
installed on the users device, and vice versa.
Current Status: Available as an origin trial. Last Updated: March 12th, 2019 |
| Shape Detection API |
The Shape Detection API opens up native implementations of shape
detection services and exposes them through a set of JavaScript
interfaces. Currently, the supported features are face detection,
barcode detection, and text detection (Optical Character Recognition).
Current Status: Behind a flag in Chrome 74. Last Updated: May 28th, 2019 |
| Wake Lock API |
To avoid draining the battery, most devices will quickly fall asleep
when left idle. While this is fine for most of the time, there are
some applications that need to keep the screen or the device awake in
order to complete some work. The Wake Lock API provides a way to
prevent the device from dimming or locking the screen or prevent
the device from going to sleep when an application needs to keep
running.
Current Status: Behind a flag in Chrome 71 for desktop. Last Updated: May 28th, 2019 |
| Writable Files API |
The Writable Files API is designed to increase interoperability of
web applications with native applications, making it possible for users
to choose files or directories that a web app can interact with on the
native file system, and without having to use a native wrapper like
Electron to ship your web app.
Current Status: Gathering feedback & iterating on design. Last Updated: November 12th, 2018 |
Launched capabilities
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Async Clipboard API (images) |
In Chrome 66, we shipped the Asynchronous Clipboard API with
support for reading and writing text. In Chrome 76, we added support
for reading and writing images to the clipboard.
Status: Launched in Chrome 76 Last Updated: July 3rd, 2019 |
| Web Share Target |
The Web Share Target API allows installed web apps to register with
the underlying OS as a share target to receive shared content from
either the Web Share API or system events, like the OS-level share
button.
Status: Launched in Chrome 71 Last Updated: December 5th, 2018 |
How will we design & implement these new capabilities?
We developed this process to make it possible to design and develop new web platform capabilities that meet the needs of developers quickly, in the open, and most importantly, work within the existing standards process. It’s no different than how we develop every other web platform feature, but it puts an emphasis on developer feedback.
Developer feedback is critical to help us ensure we’re shipping the right features, but when it comes in late in the process, it can be hard to change course. That’s why we’re starting to ask for feedback earlier. When actionable technical and use-case feedback comes in early, it’s easier to course correct or even stop development, without having shipped poorly thought out or badly implemented features. Features being developed at WICG are not set in stone, and your input can make a big difference in how they evolve.
It’s worth noting that many ideas never make it past the explainer or origin trial stage. The goal of the process is to ship the right feature. That means we need to learn and iterate quickly. Not shipping a feature because it doesn’t solve the developer need is OK. To enable this learning, we have come to employ the following process (although there is frequently some re-ordering of later steps due to feedback):
Identify the developer need
The first step is to identify and understand the developer need. What is the developer trying to accomplish? Who would use it? How are they doing it today? And what problems or frustrations are fixed by this new capability. Typically, these come in as feature request from developers, frequently through bugs filed on bugs.chromium.org.
Create an explainer
After identifying the need for a new capability, create an explainer, essentially a design doc that is meant to explain the problem, along with some sample code showing how the API might work. The explainer is a living design document that will go through heavy iteration as the new capability evolves.
Get feedback and iterate on the explainer
Once the explainer has a reasonable level of clarity, it’s time to publicize it, to solicit feedback, and iterate on the design. This is an opportunity to verify the new capability meets the needs of developers and works in a way that they expect. This is also an opportunity to gather public support and verify that there really is a need for this capability.
Move the design to a specification & iterate
Once the explainer is in a good state, the design work transitions into a formal specification, working with developers and other browser vendors to iterate and improve on the design.
Then, once the design starts to stabilize, we typically use an origin trial to experiment with the implementation. Origin trials allow you to try new features with real users, and give feedback on the implementation. This real world feedback helps shape and validate the design, ensuring we get it right, before it becomes a standard.
Ship it
Finally, once the origin trial is complete, the spec has been finalized, and all of the other launch steps have been completed, it’s time to ship it to stable.
Design for user security, privacy, and trust
Some of these features may seem scary at first, especially in light of how they’re implemented on native. But the web is inherently safer than native, opening a web page shouldn’t be scary.
Nothing should ever be granted access by default, but instead rely on a permission model that puts the user in total control, and is easily revoke-able. It needs to be crystal clear when, and how these APIs are being used. We've outlined some of our thought process in Controlling Access to Powerful Web Platform Features.