I am way out of my comfort zone here, so I will keep this short and simple. Google is working on a new experimental feature for Chrome called “Built-in Modules”.

This is not really just a Chrome specific feature, but part of a plan to move the web forward.

You can read the technical details here. Let me quote excerpts for the non-dev folks like me here.

Built-in modules are just like regular JavaScript modules, except that they don’t have to be downloaded because they ship with the browser.

Like traditional web APIs, built-in modules must go through a standardization process and have well-defined specifications, but unlike traditional web APIs, they’re not exposed on the global scope—they’re only available via imports.

Not exposing built-in modules globally has a lot of advantages: they won’t add any overhead to starting up a new JavaScript runtime context (e.g. a new tab, worker, or service worker), and they won’t consume any memory or CPU unless they’re actually imported. Furthermore, they don’t run the risk of naming collisions with other variables defined in your code.

Additional details are available on this GitHub page too. Excerpts:

With the introduction of a standard developers will get a well-defined API that does not have to be included with their pages or application. The functionality of the standard library will have gone through a standardization track and will have well-defined APIs and behavior.

If you are looking for more details on KV Storage, you can read more about it here.

Now Available on Chrome Canary

KV-storage is now available as an experimental flag in Chrome and Chrome OS Canary channel. This is expected to be shipped with version 74 of Google Chrome and Chrome OS.

To test this feature, enable the flag “chrome://flags/#enable-built-in-module-kv-storage” and restart Chrome.