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Issue 657160 link

Starred by 5 users
Status: Untriaged
Owner: ----
Cc:
rbyers@chromium.org
cyflee@chromium.org
█ wlarsen@chromium.org
█ dk...@chromium.org
namratakannan@chromium.org
dpa...@chromium.org
Components:
EstimatedDays: ----
NextAction: ----
OS: All
Pri: 3
Type: Feature



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Improve insight into what is new in a Chrome release

Project Member Reported by addyo@chromium.org, Oct 18 2016 
Version: All versions
OS: All platforms

What steps will reproduce the problem?
(1) Update Chrome (or navigate to chrome:settings > about)
(2) Be informed that you are up to date (or an update is available)
(3) There is no insight into what exactly changed

What is the expected output?

A link to a page summarizing what is new in the release.

What do you see instead?

Sadly, nothing. Chrome has historically provided developers with little direct insight into what changed during a release from the Chrome UI or Chrome settings pages. This is not due to a lack of:

1. Great effort on Chromium blog posts for each beta milestone
2. The existence of a ChromeStatus entry for each milestone (e.g https://www.chromestatus.com/features#milestone%3D55) 
2. Developer docs/announcements on developers.google.com/web
3. A commit log we could link to
4. Marketing-based docs more targeted at users

Each milestone has a lot of useful content that is worked on for it. We just don't provide a meaningful summary of what is new. Perhaps we could start with linking to ChromeStatus or crafting a milestone-specific page that has a drill-down of links to what is new? :)

Many other browser vendors provide developers a better user experience with updates. Firefox link to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/48.0/releasenotes/ for example. I've been a huge fan of the overall structure to Safari's Tech Preview release notes: https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/release-notes/

A few ideas:

- Start with linking up to the ChromeStatus.com milestone entry for a page. Each entry includes links to developer education around the feature landing (or tries to) as well as intents/CR bugs. Perhaps a decent start?

- Maybe given we already have the above data we could create a 'prettier' Milestone view for ChromeStatus.

- Introduce a section on developers.google.com/web/ for this that is slightly better edited.
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Comment 1 by raymondc...@gmail.com, Oct 18 2016 

A few notes:

ChromeStatus is good for developer features, but doesn't cover consumer changes. For example, maybe a new menu item to switch Chrome's UI into "dark mode". As a user of Chrome, I not only want to know about the new cool JS API, I also want to know about new generic features of the browser itself.

It is crucial that whatever UI is used is *not* just something presented on first view after update. The developer may not have time to read about the new version then. It should be always available (and I think from the About screen) so the developer can check it out when they have time. Also note Firefox has links to previous editions too which would be nice.

To your note about Safari's release notes - I like them too, but if open Safari Tech Preview, you will see that there is no link to those notes. (Or if there is, I don't see it.) To me, discoverability is 50% of the issue here.

Comment 2 by tbuck...@chromium.org, Oct 19 2016

Labels: Hotlist-MD-Settings-About
Status: Available (was: Untriaged)
Adding a link to release information (eg. blogpost) on the About page seems reasonable/safe, though relatively few users ever end up there. Whatever we add should not be specific to developers.

If we want to help more users understand the new features, a more prominent surface should be chosen.
Project Member

Comment 3 by sheriffbot@chromium.org, Oct 20 2017

Labels: Hotlist-Recharge-Cold
Status: Untriaged (was: Available)
This issue has been Available for over a year. If it's no longer important or seems unlikely to be fixed, please consider closing it out. If it is important, please re-triage the issue.

Sorry for the inconvenience if the bug really should have been left as Available. If you change it back, also remove the "Hotlist-Recharge-Cold" label.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

Comment 4 by dpa...@chromium.org, Oct 27

Cc: cyflee@chromium.org

Comment 5 by cyflee@google.com, Dec 20

Cc: namratakannan@chromium.org wlarsen@chromium.org
+some UXers as FYI. may considered this as "phase 1" of the "myChrome" effort.
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