Google announced the launch of a new version of Googlebot. Now the web crawler will always work based on the latest version of Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome was built on.
At the moment, Googlebot uses Chromium version 74 instead of the long-obsolete 41st.
The updated crawler now supports over 1000 new features, including ES6, IntersectionObserver for lazy-loading and Web Components v1 APIs .
Thanks to this, Google will be able to process more content sites, which means that their owners may no longer need to create special solutions and use functions such as transpiling or polyfills so that Googlebot can index their content.
However, Googlebot can still not see everything.
“Some restrictions remain, so check out our tool for troubleshooting JS sites and view our series of videos on JavaScript SEO,” Google said.
Recall, Google said it was working to close the gap between Googlebot and modern browsers in October 2018. In April, it became known that this work is actively progressing and is already nearing completion. In the same month, DeepCrawl experts noticed that Google is testing a new, more modern rendering engine for Googlebot, which runs on Chrome 69 and higher. Now the company has officially updated its web crawler.
