Martin Splitt from the Google Webmaster Trends Analyst team said yesterday on a hangout that they are working on closing the gap between how modern browsers render web pages and how GoogleBot renders web pages.
We all know that GoogleBot is typically well behind the most recent Chrome release and thus cannot render web pages that are more modern that Chrome can render. Especially the newer and cooler JavaScript framework based web sites. But Martin made it sound like Google is working hard on a solution that will get GoogleBot to be up to speed with the latest browser releases.
Martin said "There's a gap between what modern browsers do and what Google does right now. We're working on closing this gap sustainably. So it's not a catch-up game right now. It’s gonna be with we're taking longer to make sure that in the long run we are more up to up to speed. And that's going to give us a bunch of improvements in terms of performance and rendering cost as well."
He also added that webmasters do not need to do anything special for GoogleBot, that this is a Google issue and not a webmaster issue. He did add that you can help Google if you want to but it really is not a webmaster issue. "Generally speaking, you don't have to worry about these kind of things, that's our job and we're trying our best to make it happen. It's very nice if people wanna spare us computing cycles but it will actually catch up more over time," Martin said.
This was said at the 12:25 mark into the video.
Here is the video embed:
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