After a dedicated focus on mobile applications in our smartphone-obsessed society, technology leaders are working to enhance the web experience. Facebook product manager Jonathan McKay, who works on a team dedicated to improving that web experience for applications, said that Facebook has a couple of web-focused projects in the works. For one, it’s focusing on push notifications in the Google Chrome browser.

“That’s something that traditionally you only get if you build a native app, but we’ve brought it to the web, and we have quite a few people using it every day,” he told analyst George Gilbert, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the @Scale conference in San Jose, California. “We also worked with Opera to get contact importer as a feature that a website can use by working with the browser, which allows new users to find friends easier even though we’re on a website.”

Why the move to enhance the web experience? Isn’t mobile where it’s at? McKay said the pendulum still sits with native apps. “But this time, mobile web has been catching up,” he said. “Were seeing that the mobile web has access to all of these features on smartphones that traditionally were just the purview of native apps. All these things that you could only get from being a native app, now, browsers specifically are bringing these and surfacing them so web developers can take advantage of them.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of @Scale 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE