Google Changing Up Its Field Trials Infrastructure

Should help developers get Field Trials out at a quicker pace

By Zach Walton

Google Chrome, like Mozilla Firefox, is a browser that’s built by the community. Sure, Google is the one that pushes out the updates, but it’s the community that is breaking and fixing the browser on a constant basis to make it better. Google has some nice changes for those developers that help make Chrome the browser that it is.

If you’re a Chrome developer, you probably already know about Field Trials. It’s where developers get to try out new features on real users and see which ones actually work. The practice has led to a lot of great innovations on Chrome that users see the results of every day. If you’re just jumping into Chrome development, its highly recommend that you use Field Trials to test out any features that you come up with.

Google recently added infrastructure to its Field Trials program. The addition made it easier to design and deploy tests to users around the world. The new changes to the infrastructure make that job easier since developers will now be able to rely on a regular update schedule for Field Trials. This puts it on the same kind of update cycle that Chrome uses, but it remains unknown if Field Trials will update faster or slower than Chrome’s current rate of every six weeks.

The other change is that Google has made it easier for developers to reset their variation state if they’re on M21 or higher. It was achieved by centralizing the logic of which variations were active. Developers can take advantage of this update by using the reset-variation-state command line flag.

If you want to see more about this new Chrome update, just check out the Field Trials page over at the Chromium Project. It has all the details you need to start taking advantage of Field Trials and its various nuances.