Google Chrome's origin trials program plays a pivotal role in this process, allowing developers to experiment with these features before they become mainstream.
What are Origin Trials?
As technology evolves, web developers are constantly striving to enhance the user experience. One way they achieve this is by testing and adopting new features and APIs that can make websites faster, more secure, and more user-friendly.
Origin trials are a mechanism introduced by browser vendors to enable developers to test new web features and APIs in a controlled environment before they become part of the official web platform standards. This process allows for early feedback and ensures that the features work as intended across various real-world use cases.
Why Origin Trials matter
Origin Trials could be considered the lifeblood of innovation on the web. They enable developers to experiment with new features in a controlled environment, gather real-world feedback, and refine these technologies before they become part of the official web platform standards.
It's like getting an early glimpse of the future of the web as most of those new features and browser APIs are here to stay.
Participating in Origin Trials
You can register for the trial to enable the feature for all users on your origin, without requiring your website visitors to toggle any flags or switch to an alternative build of Chrome (though they may need to upgrade). When it comes to actually benefitting from such features, it helps if you're either a developer, or hire a developer.
Want to learn more or want to get started with Origin Trials. Check the developer page on Origin Trials.
Third party Origin Trials
If you want to leverage capabilities of origin trials across multiple domains at once, you should third party Origin Trials.
As RUMvision is a Software-as-a-Service, a mix of website owners and web agencies are using our pagespeed solution for monitoring and debugging purposes. As our monitoring JavaScript is loaded from a different domain than the hostname/origin of website owners, this means we need to identify ourselves as a third party Origin Trial.
In the screenshot above, you see a checkbox saying "Third-party matching. The token will be injected by script on other origins. This needs to be enabled when registering for an Origin Trial as a third party.
