Hello. Welcome to the CER 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 Damian Renzuli. He's a partner engineer here at Google on the Chrome Enterprise team and he specializes in progressive web apps. Alongside Damian 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. 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 Damian 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. 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. 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. 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 first speaker Damian and he's going to dive into the new feature updates coming to Chrome in 2023. Thank you, Rich. I'm going to start sharing my screen. In the meantime, these topics that you are seeing right now are the ones that we are going to cover today. These are basically five different topics that we consider are major things that are going to happen in 2023. We have picked them and we will be sharing a brief overview on each of them but next year we are going to have different experts talking about each of these topics in depth. Today is more like an overview. It's going to be a summary and we are going to go deeper into each of them when the time comes. So, just to start with the first one. Long term support releases. If you are using Chrome OS or you have been a Chrome OS developer for a while or even a system administrator, you might know that Chrome OS releases a full operating system update every four weeks. As a developer, what you can do to anticipate any new things that are coming on every version of the Chrome OS operating system is to use two different channels. You can use the developer channel and the beta channel and you can test on these versions and these channels before the stable release comes. But having to do that on a monthly basis can be a time-consuming process. 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 and that can take a lot of effort. So, the idea of the long term support release is to give two additional channels to help having a longer period of time between updates. So, you don't have to be testing 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. 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. It's 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 channels that we mentioned before like the Dev Channel for example and the Beta Channel to anticipate to the stable release but in this case, if you turn on these long term support channels you are going to have one channel that's the long term support candidate and then you are 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 you might be in the first row which is the one that belongs to the stable channel four-week cycle and if you do your homework properly what you would be doing is to test every month. So, every time a new release comes you might be anticipating to this new stable release by testing on the Dev and the Beta Channels and then once you are ready the new channel is going to come into play. But if you turn on these long term support channels instead of that what you are going to have is this longer six-month period of time where there is 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 or any major changes but they are going to receive security fixes, for example to make sure that everything works well. In this case right now we are in December, right? So, December 2023 so if you have this enabled your users would be using what we call here the 102 LTS version and the next version is going to come in March, right? So, the one that is running right now comes started in September and is going to run until March and then the next one is going to come from March to August 2023. To anticipate to this next release what you can do is to test what is going to happen before all these changes take place. So, in this case the long term channel that is going to be used as a basis for the next release is the 108 LTC. This is basically 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 you can have a good level of confidence that everything is going to work well and this LTC release is going to be based on the immediately 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? 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 and instead of that if you enable LTS you only have to test one stable version to prepare before the LTC version comes then you have here a copy of what's going to happen afterwards you can continue testing here nothing 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 predictable pace for the changes that are going to happen and make it to happen twice a year instead of like once a month. If you are interested in this both as a system admin and as a developer you can find more details here chromoes.dev is a site that we use to publish any technical articles and any information that we have the education category of the chromoes.dev has an article called chromoes LTS and then you can find 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 the operating system actually and we call it Chrome browser as an independent app. What does it mean? So right now chromoes is the Chrome browser is embedded completely into the chromoes binary so you can think of it as both the operating system and the browser are tightly coupled together. Afterwards the Chrome browser is going to be separated from the operating system and is going to be used as an independent app. So once you have these two things isolated from each other 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 happens. 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. Basically the idea is to make it transparent to your users so you don't have to worry about anything that's going to break. This is expected to start by the middle of 2023 and it's going to run well into 2024. If you are a customer or an app developer you have multiple months to verify that everything is going to work well and the objective here is to address any issues before the old architecture is retired. So in this case what you're going to have the chance is to have a developer preview which will go in 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. 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 pager that has all the information and you can request access for it and finally you have the trusted testing program to apply. So we are going to send this deck along with all the relevant links to you so you can check and make use of it. Next topic, upcoming deprecations. 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 and we don't have a certain date for this but this is likely going to happen soon. So if you are using Chrome apps at this point you should be working on a migration plan. To make things relatively easy you have two different options here. Either you build the progressive web app or you build a Chrome extension I guess that most of you might be familiar with Chrome extensions but for those that are not very familiar with progressive web apps this is something that the web has embraced. Progressive 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 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 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. More information about progressive web app you can find in the web.dev which is our site for any technical article related to the web. And then we have a full article for the Chrome app migration which is 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're right now having Chrome extension in manifest B2 you should be thinking about moving to B3. What is the motivation for this? More transparency control over permissions 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 this change. And from the technical point of view about what's going to actually change I think the biggest one is going to be that service workers are going to replace background pages. If you are not familiar with service workers those are actually JavaScript files that run in the background and they are the heart of the progressive web app. So right now extensions B3 are going to have new service workers instead of the previously used background pages in this case. Network request modification is now handled with a new declarative network request API and the remotely hosted code is no longer going to be allowed. An extension can only execute JS code that's included inside its own package. Finally, promise support 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 promise support while we are not going to stop supporting the callbacks 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 but as we said with Chrome app deprecation if you are working on B2 you should be definitely thinking on how to migrate to this B3 version as soon as possible. More details about MB3 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 Chrome app deprecation and the B2 deprecation. We are moving now to the policy API so my colleague Ashish is going to go over this topic. Ashish please if you want to take over from now. Thank you Damien. Welcome everybody to the session. Today I'm going to be talking about policy API. Next slide please. Thanks Damien. So Google's enterprise Chrome OS 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 there are a variety of management APIs that customers and partners alike can use for their custom use cases. Chrome 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 Chrome 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 Chrome 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 Chrome 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. You have visibility into the changes you make through the API and we have audit logging which provides these changes within the standard Admin audit logs. The API was designed with a data-driven approach. The Chrome Policy that we have are represented as data and are directly referenced by the API interface. This 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 is growing. The Chrome Policy API complements the Administic API which is another one of our management APIs within the Google platform. With that said, let's talk about some 2023 plans for the Chrome Policy API. Next slide, please. So 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. We will also make extensive improvements with the structure and functionality of the policy scheme 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 values. 2023 will also see scaled up support resources for partner developments, a central partner escalation desk portal, community resources, documentation and starter reference implementations. With that said, I would like to thank everybody for listening in and for your time and I'll pass it back to Damian. Thank you, Ashish. So we have come to the end of this presentation almost. We have seen five different things that are going to happen in 2023. That's 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 browser is going to be isolated from the operating system in what we call Chrome Browser as an independent app. We talked a little bit about upcoming deprecations, Chrome app deprecation and Manipest v3. Finally, we talked about policy API as well. From these things, long-term support releases are already available so you can go directly to the site and take a look if you want to enable that for your users. The Chrome Browser as an independent app is a change that's likely going to happen next year. We have concrete timelines for it and 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. If you are working on them, you'd better think about migrating. Finally, the policy API 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. I think that's pretty much it for the topics. Going now back to Rich so you can continue with the rest of the presentation and steps. Thank you, Damian. Thank you, Ashish. One second while I share my screen. Damian, can you go ahead and switch to the next slide? I just want to point out a few next steps to keep in mind. First, as Damian mentioned, you will be receiving this slide deck in your CER partner folder. 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 Hour website for a list of upcoming events and additional resources. 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. We appreciate you here being with us and we hope to see you at our next webinar. Have a good day.


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