The Introduction to Aurora

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On the Chrome team, we care about user experience and a thriving web ecosystem. We want users to have the best possible experience on the web, not only with static documents but also when they use rich, highly-interactive applications.

Open-source tools and frameworks play a large role in enabling developers to build modern apps for the web, while also supporting good developer experiences. These frameworks and tools empower companies of all sizes, as well as individuals building for the web.

We believe that frameworks can also play a big role in helping developers with key quality aspects such as performance, accessibility, security, mobile readiness. Instead of asking every developer and site owner to become an expert in these areas and keep up with the constantly changing best practices, the framework can support these with baked-in solutions. This empowers developers and enables them to focus on building product features.

In a nutshell, our vision is that a high bar of UX quality becomes a side effect of building for the web.

Aurora: a collaboration between Chrome and open-source web frameworks & tools

For almost two years, we have worked with some of the most popular frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt and Angular, working to improve web performance. We've also funded popular tools and libraries such as Vue, ESLint, webpack. Today, we are giving this effort a name - Aurora.

An aurora is a natural light display that shimmers in the sky. As we are trying to help user experiences built with frameworks shimmer and shine, we thought this name was an appropriate choice. In the coming months, we'll be sharing a lot more detail on Aurora. This is a collaboration between a small team of Chrome engineers (internally codenamed WebSDK) and framework authors. Our goal is to deliver the best user experience possible for production apps regardless of the browser you're rendering in.

What is our strategy?

At Google, we've learned a lot while using frameworks and tools to build and maintain large scale web applications such as Google Search, Maps, Image Search, Google Photos etc. We discovered how frameworks can play a crucial role in predictable app quality by providing strong defaults and opinionated tooling.

Frameworks have a unique vantage point for influencing both DX and UX as they span the entire system: the client and the server, the development and production environments, and they integrate tools such as compiler, bundler, linter etc. When solutions are baked into the framework, teams of developers can use these solutions and focus their time on what matters most to the product -- shipping great features for users.

While we work to improve tools that live in every layer of the stack, frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt, and Angular CLI, manage every step of an application's lifecycle. For this reason, and the fact that React adoption is the largest within the core UI framework ecosystem, most of our optimizations have begun with proving out in Next.js before expanding to the rest of the ecosystem.

Aurora supports success at scale by bringing solutions to the right layer of popular tech stacks. By bridging the gap between browsers and frameworks, it enables high-quality to be a side-effect of building for the web while acting as a feedback loop to improve the web platform.

Conclusion

The Aurora team (Shubhie, Houssein, Alex, Gerald, Ralph, Addy) look forward to continuing to work closely with the open-source framework community on improving user experience defaults in Next.js, Nuxt and Angular. We'll be growing our engagement to cover even more frameworks and tools over time. Watch this space for more blog posts, talks and RFCs from our team over the coming year :)