[MUSIC PLAYING]
ERIC BIDELMAN: All right.
Welcome back, everybody.
It's Eric Bidelman here
at Chrome Dev Summit 2016.
Just starting the
afternoon sessions.
I'm here with Dru Knox, PM
on all things web platform,
is my understanding.
DRU KNOX: All things is
a little bold statement.
PM on several
things web platform.
ERIC BIDELMAN: Several
very important things.
And speaking of important,
you gave a great talk
on client side storage,
and all the things
that Chrome is doing for that.
Can you give us
a little overview
of what you talked about?
DRU KNOX: So the main thing I
was trying to say in the talk
was that offline is
really important,
and it's something that
we've talked a lot about here
at Chrome Dev Summit.
But it's really also
a very effective way
to use caching to improve
your loading performance.
So client storage
is not just offline.
It's also a massive
performance win.
It was kind of the
crux of the talk.
ERIC BIDELMAN: Don't forget
about things like browser cache
and all these things
do still apply, even
with all these really
amazing new APIs.
You talked a little bit
about some cool stuff
that I'm really excited about,
which is promises for index
database, new FileWriter API.
Can you talk a little
bit about those?
DRU KNOX: Yeah, so you see
a lot of libraries available
these days that offer promise
wrappers for Index DB.
So it's clearly something
people really want.
Unfortunately, it's
kind of complex, right?
Promises don't map directly
to transactions very well.
So we're still hammering
out the details,
but it's an open
area of exploration.
It's something we're hoping
will be coming sooner
rather than later.
We're working on
the spec for that.
Writable files,
on the other hand,
is something pretty
completely new.
It's something that people have
kicked around for a long time.
I know it's one of the main
reasons people use Electron.
It's very popular there.
The idea being that instead of
having to upload and download
files all the time-- which is
not a great user experience.
It's not super
quick and seamless.
Instead, we want to
give sites the ability
to have persistent
handle to files
on the user's native device.
So it's not Sandbox.
And this allows you to, on
repeat visits to the site,
they can just open up that file
and immediately read contents
out of it.
You get use cases like having
a folder that play music,
or a Spotify web
app or something
can monitor and upload
files from your collection.
Or having a most recently
used list for text editor,
or photo editor, or
something like that.
ERIC BIDELMAN: This is one of
the last endeavors for PWAs,
is having a writable
file system.
So one last question
before we wrap it up here.
I understand your grandmother
was watching your presentation.
Does she have anything
to say about it?
DRU KNOX: She did, yes.
So her exact quotes were, I
believe, "Bless his soul."
So that was great.
Hopefully that's a positive
bless his soul, not a,
oh, bless his soul.
And then, I'm very
proud of my grandson.
So everyone's good.
They laughed at my jokes.
And she was proud.
ERIC BIDELMAN: Awesome.
OK.
With that, we'll sign off right
now from Chrome Dev Summit.
Join us on Twitter
at @chromedevsummit,
and on our YouTube channel.
Thanks a lot, guys.
