As Google LLC hosts its annual Chrome Developer Summit this week, it’s announcing several developer-centric updates to its popular web browser.

A big focus of Google’s efforts with its Chrome browser in recent times has been on expanding the versatility of the internet and making it more accessible, and to do that it’s giving developers access to tools that will allow them to distribute their content more easily. One example is Google’s Portals tool, available in preview since last year, which developers can use to “pre-render” content and then embed it within their websites, allowing for much faster loading times.

Extending this capability, Google today introduced Web Bundles, an experimental new feature that enables content to be distributed across the web in any format without the need for a constant connection, be it email, FTP or USB.

“Not only does this unlock delivery of web content at lightning fast speeds, it also allows for distribution to happen when your user is offline,” Dion Almaer of Chrome’s Web Developer Ecosystem team wrote in a blog post.

Web Bundles is complemented by Google’s new Background Periodic Sync and Content Indexing application programming interfaces. Currently available as “Origin Trials,” they can be used by developers to “proactively cache and surface relevant web content for people, even if they’re not on an active internet connection,” Google said.

Additional updates to Chrome cater to what Google calls “the rise of mobile-first in developing markets.” They’re focused on bringing “native-like experiences” to those who primarily access the web from mobile devices.

New capabilities available in Origin Trial in Chrome include “SMS Receiver,” which makes it possible for web applications to retrieve two-factor SMS messages; “Contact Picker,” which lets web content be shared among a devices’ contact list; and a “Native File System API” that lets web apps read and save changes directly to files and folders on a mobile device. That last enables developers to create a new breed of apps that can interact with these files, such as photo and video editors.

Elsewhere, Google says it’s releasing the first chapters of The Web Almanac, which provides a more holistic look at web performance and trends, built in collaboration with numerous experts around the web. The Web Almanac is designed to be used alongside new metrics tools such as Largest Contentful Paint, which measures how quickly web users see the most meaningful page content, and Cumulative Layout Shift, which measures how stable a page feels to users and how quickly they can start reading or interacting with it, without waiting for the page to fully render itself.

“We believe that these metrics, chosen based on your individual use case, can provide a holistic view of real user experience to web developers,” Almaer said.

Then there are the usual improvements in performance and memory. Finally, Google said it’s making its third-party cookie controls more visible to developers

“Starting with the Chrome M79 Beta, we’re experimenting with a toggle for controlling third-party cookies on the Incognito New Tab Page,” Almaer said. “We are also working on redesigning our settings pages to make access to this control easier in regular mode.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE the updates were all about motivating developers to upgrade their web-based application’s code to create more powerful experiences.

“Making loading times disappear with the new Web Bundles shipment is practically creating an “un-browser user experience,” Mueller said. “And giving developers better instrumentation is never a bad move.”

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