ChromeOS new feature updates

Key Takeaways

foreign hello welcome to the CR Technical Community hour today we're going to discuss new feature updates to Chrome OS that are coming in 2023. my name is Rich I'm your host I'm a program manager here at Google on the Chrome Enterprise team with us today we have two amazing speakers our first speaker is Damien Renzulli he's a partner engineer here at Google on the Chrome Enterprise team and he specializes in Progressive web apps alongside Damien we have Ashish pujari he's also a partner engineer here at Google on the Chrome Enterprise team and he specializes in trust and security foreign to kick off today's session we're going to review the CER program and the CER Technical Community hour after that I'm going to hand it over to Damien and Ashish and they're going to dive into the new updates for 2023 and then we're going to close with some next steps so let's talk about CER Chrome Enterprise recommended is Google's invite only partner program for third-party solutions that are validated for Chrome OS or integrated with Chrome browser so how do we do that firstly we ensure Enterprise confidence and we do this by making sure that we understand our customers and users needs and we ensure that we can meet those needs secondly we work with our partners to make sure that all their applications and their Solutions work to the highest of technical operability on Chrome OS we make sure that they continue to stay up to date on new features and lastly we partner with them for marketing and co-selling opportunities So within the CER program we have this all new initiative it's called the CER Technical Community hour and this is a webinar Series in which we have a Google subject matter expert come speak to us about new updates and features to Chrome OS within this webinar series we want to provide best practices for our Enterprise developers we want to introduce new features and updates that are coming to Chrome OS and we also would like to provide some insight on Chrome technology and chrome strategy with that being said I'm going to hand it over to our our first Speaker Damien and he's going to dive into the new feature updates coming to Chrome in 2023. Thank you Rich uh I'm going to start sharing my screen in the meantime these topics that you are saying right now are the ones that we are going to cover today so these are basically five different topics that we consider are major things that are going to happen in 2023 so we we have picked them uh and we will be sharing like a brief overview on each of them but next year we are going to have uh different experts talking about each of these topics uh in depth so today is more like an overview is going to be a summary and uh we're going to go deeper into each of them when the time comes so just to start um with the first one long-term support releases um if you are using Chrome OS or you have been a chromos developer for a while or even a system administrator uh you might know that Chrome OS releases like a full operating system update every four weeks as a developer what you can do to anticipate to any new things that are coming on every version of the chromos operating system is to use uh two different channels you can use the developer Channel and the beta Channel and you can test uh on this uh versions in these channels before the stable release comes um but having to do that on a monthly basis can be a time consuming process uh if you think about it every month you need to anticipate to potentially new features that are coming or deprecations or any critical bug fixes and things like that and you need to make sure that your app is going to be running well um and that can take a lot of effort right so the idea of the long-term support release is to give um two additional channels to help um having like a longer period of time between updates um so you don't have to be testing uh very frequently but at the same time users can still use a very stable version of the operating system maintaining security and all the properties that you know about the operating system so from these two channels we have two different channels here uh one is the long-term support candidate and the other one is the long-term support channel the first one is actually being used for you to test is the one that you are going to be using to test to anticipate to the next major release and the second one is the actual Channel that's going to be released for your users so this is very similar to what we were doing in the past with the uh the channels that we mentioned before uh like the dev channel for example or the beta channel to anticipate the stable release but in this case if you turn on uh these long-term support channels you are going to have one channel that's the uh long-term support candidate and then you're going to have the proper one the long-term support Channel so this can be a little bit confusing but now if you see in this diagram you might have a better idea so right now uh you might be in the first row which is the one that belongs to the stable channel four week cycle and if you uh do your homework properly what you would be doing is to test every month so every time a new release comes you might be anticipated to this new stable release by testing on the dev and the channels and then once you're ready the new channel is going to come into play uh but if you turn on these uh long-term support channels instead of that what you are going to have is this longer six months period of time where uh there's only one version right and during this time users are not going to receive any critical update like they are not going to receive any new features um or any major changes but they are going to receive these security fixes for example to make sure that everything works well um in this case right now we are in December right so December 2023 so if you have this enabled your users would be uh using what we call here the 102 LDS version and the next version is going to come in March right so the one that's running right now comes uh starting in September and it's going to run until March and then the next one is going to come uh from March to August 2023. uh to anticipate to this next release uh what you can do is to test uh what's going to happen before all these changes that takes place so in this case uh the long-term Channel that's uh going to be used as a basis for the next release is the 108 LTC this is basically uh the basis for the next LTS version so you can think of it as a copy of it so the next LTS is going to be taken from this one so if you test here um you can have a good level of confidence that everything is going to work well um and this LTS sorry LTC release is going to be based on the immediately uh previous stable release right so if you test on the 107 stable in this case that's the one that's going to be used for 108 and finally the 108 is going to be used for the 108 LTS which is this one right uh this actually decreases the testing effort a lot because if we go back a little bit today to make sure that everything works well you would be testing every month um instead of that if you enable LTX you only have to test one stable version to prepare before the LTC version comes then you have uh here a copy of what's going to happen afterwards you can continue testing here nothing uh is going to change during this three month period of time and after that this is the one that's going to be sent to users right so the idea is not only to reduce the amount of effort that you have to put but also to have more uh predictable pace for the changes that are going to happen and make it uh to happen twice a year instead of like once a month um if you are interested in this both as a system admin and as a developer you can find more details here uh chromos.dev is a site that we use to publish any technical articles and any uh information that we have um the education category of the chromos dev has an article called Chrome OS LTS and then you can follow the information on how to enable it and more details on how to properly test it the next topic here is a change that's going to take place in uh the operating system actually and we call it Chrome browser as an independent app what does it mean so right now Chrome OS um is the Chrome browser is embedded completely into the Chrome OS binary so you can think of it as both the operating system and the browser I tightly coupled together uh afterwards the Chrome browser is going to be uh separated from the operating system and it's going to be used as an independent app so once you have these two things uh isolated from each other um this is going to be a major change but we don't expect like any new features to be unlocked from day one when this happened the idea with this separation is to have the opportunity to introduce more changes independently so you can expect like more Innovation coming in the future but at the beginning nothing major is going to happen um and basically idea is to make it transparent to your users so you don't have to worry about uh anything that's going to break uh this is expected to start by the middle of 2023 and it's going to run um well into 2024 uh if you are a customer or an app developer you have a multiple months to verify that everything is going to work well uh and the objective here is to address any issues before the old architecture uh is retired is retired so in this case what you're going to have the chance is to have a developer preview uh which we'll call An Early Access if you apply for it you can start using the new version of the operating system so you can make sure that everything works well and this is going to start this month from December we are going to enable this Early Access program so you can use it uh we are looking for app developers like you to test this to make sure that nothing breaks and what we call success for this experiment is that everything works normal and the user doesn't notice anything happening but if you find any issues you can report it and it's going to be for us the opportunity to work on it here are some links you have the one picture that has all the information and you can request access for it and finally you have the trusted tested program uh to apply so we are going to send this deck along with all the relevant links to you so you can check and um make use of it next topic upcoming deprecations uh there are two big deprecations that are going to take place at some point we expect this to start happening in 2023. the first one is the Chrome apps deprecation which has been happening for a while um and we don't have a certain date for this but this is likely going to happen soon so if you're using Chrome apps at this point you should be working on a migration plan uh to make things relatively easy you have two different options here either you build a progressive web app or you build a Chrome extension uh I guess that most of you might be familiar with from extensions but for those that are not uh very familiar with Progressive web apps this is something that the web has embraced it was pricey web started more or less in 2015 and basically what it means is to have a website that's going to have capabilities that in the past only native apps could have so for example if you need to have file system access is you're going to have an API for that if you need to have any other Hardware access you also are going to have an API for that in the cases that this is not enough you can uh use a pattern when you integrate the progressive web app with the Chrome extension and then you have access to not only the pwa apis but also the Chrome extension apis as well um more information about Progressive web you can find in the world Dev which is our site for any article technical article related to the web and then we have a full article for the Chrome app migration which is uh under this link the second big deprecation that's going to happen in 2023 is the migration from the Manifest B2 to B3 this is related to Chrome extensions so if you are right now have a Chrome extension in manifest V2 you should be thinking about moving to B3 uh what is the motivation for this more transparency control over permissions uh we're going to add stricter protocols for accessing resources outside the extension context and ensuring that extensions work well on every device so these are mostly some security motivations behind behind this change and from the point of technical point of view about what's going to actually change um I think the biggest one is going to be that service workers are going to replace background patients uh if you are not familiar with service workers those are actually uh JavaScript files that run in the background and they are the heart of a progressive wall app uh so right now extensions B3 are going to have new service workers instead of the previously used background patients in this case Network request modification is now handled with a new declarative net request API and the remotely hosted goal is no longer going to be allowed an extension can only execute JS code that's included inside its own package finally promise report has been added to many methods but the old JavaScript callbacks are still going to be supported as an alternative so we continue adding more uh promise support while we are not going to stop uh supporting the pro uh the call box in this case transition timeline we don't have an exact timeline for this but we expect to have something to share very soon so hopefully we are going to announce that at some point uh but as we said we come up degradation if you're working on B2 you should be definitely thinking of how to migrate to this B3 version as soon as possible more details about MP3 you can find in this link which is also going to be attached to this presentation so you can take a look and obviously if you have any question you can contact us so we can offer support it's pretty much it with the uh Chrome up duplication uh and the V2 deprecation we are moving now to the policy API so my goalie Ashish is going to go over this topic uh Ashish please if you want to take over from now all right thank you Damien uh welcome everybody uh to the session uh today I'm going to be talking about policy API uh next slide please right thanks Damian um so Google's Enterprise Chrome is offering provides different methods for customers to manage their devices and users and for partners to manage them on their behalf alongside Google's first party management platform that is the Google admin console uh there are there are a variety of management apis that customers and partners alike can use for their custom use cases current policy API is one of several apis intended to expose management functionality to customers and partners it enables customers to build custom tooling and enables Partners to build Management Services of their own within their own products to assist customers in their Chrome OS management Journey the core policy API allows the reading and modification of all policy settings all of which can be found in the admin console settings page for fully granular Fleet Management the court policy API is a suite of services that empowers Chrome administrators to programmatically view and manage Chrome policies assigned to the organizational units in their organization key advantages of using ground policy API include Google admin console compatibility so the changes you make within the API are reflected in the Google admin console UI and vice versa uh you have visibility into the changes you make through the API and we have audit logging which uh which provides uh these changes has uh within the standard admin audit logs the API was designed with a data driven approach the Chrome the Chrome policy that uh that we have are represented as data and other directly referenced by the API interface this lets us or lets you automate API clients for consumption of future Chrome policies without additional development over time the number of policies supported via the API will increase currently Support over 700 policies and the list list is growing uh the core policy API complements the administic API which is another one of our management apis uh within the Google platform with that said let's talk about some 2023 uh plans for the Chrome policy API next slide please so uh in 2023 our team will continue to enable core policy management functionality including additional level policy capabilities and broader support for policy management for Google groups in addition to organizational units you will also make extensive improvements to the structure and functionality of the policy schema itself facilitating more straightforward partner management feature development with localized policy schemas encoded field validation to carry forward into the UI and specify default and allow values for given policies and no use 2023 will also see scaled up support resources for partner developments uh a central partner escalation desk portal Community Resources documentation and started reference implementations with that said I would like to thank everybody for listening in and for your time and I'll pass it back today thank you Ashish so we have gone to the end of this presentation almost uh we have seen five different things that are going to happen in uh 23 2023 that's uh worth taking a look if you are interested in working as a developer in Chrome OS that year the first thing that we have seen is long-term support releases then we have seen that the uh the browser is going to be isolated from the operating system in what we call Chrome browsers independent app uh we talked a little bit about upcoming deprecations corrupt deprecation and money psv3 and finally we talk about policy API as well uh from these uh things uh long-term support releases are already available so you can go directly to a site and take a look if you want to enable that for your users uh the Chrome browser is an independent app is a change that's likely going to happen next year and we have a concrete timelines for you it um and um it's going to start we have an early access program for this month we have the two upcoming deprecations which timelines haven't been defined yet but have been announced so if you are working on them you'd better think about migrating and finally the policy API uh that if you need any type of support you can get in contact with us so we can help you on that front as well uh I think that's pretty much it for the topics uh going now back to uh Bridge so you can continue with the rest of the presentation and steps thank you Damien and thank you Ashish be one second while I share my screen Damien can you go ahead and switch to the next slide perfect so I just want to point out a few next steps to keep in mind first um as Damian mentioned you will be receiving this slide deck in your CER partner folder so please look through the deck click on any links that interest you and if you have any questions about anything please contact your POC here at Google and lastly please visit our CER Technical Community our website for a list of upcoming events and additional resources foreign and lastly please visit our website chromeos.dev forward slash e and forward slash Enterprise and there you can find even more resources and additional content as well thank you all for joining uh we appreciate you here being with us and we hope to see you at our next webinar have a good day