After years of development, Google announced that Googlebot has become evergreen, and that will stay up-to-date with the latest version of Chromium. This is indeed big news. Here is Google’s announcement:
“Today, we are happy to announce that Googlebot now runs the latest Chromium rendering engine (74 at the time of this post) when rendering pages for Search. Moving forward, Googlebot will regularly update its rendering engine to ensure support for latest web platform features.”
With the latest update, Googlebot now supports 1,000+ new features, but it isn’t all-powerful, as Google has demonstrated on an example Java page. It still needs two passes to fully render a Javascript page. In the first crawl, it will index and render in the second one. This will cause some delays in processing.
Ilya Grigorik couldn’t praise the latest development enough on his Twitter:
“First day of #io19 is a wrap. So many awesome highlights, but if I had to choose just one amongst many..
First day of #io19 is a wrap. So many awesome highlights, but if I had to choose just one amongst many..
Googlebot running latest Chromium and now also on the evergreen track (blog post @ https://t.co/3sCrOQZpon) takes the cake. Not only is it a huge win for web developers… pic.twitter.com/0CyuVxwTrD
— Ilya Grigorik (@igrigorik) May 8, 2019
Googlebot running latest Chromium and now also on the evergreen track (blog post @ http://bit.ly/2VmhD2J ) takes the cake. Not only is it a huge win for web developers…”
“no more transpiling of ES6 and thousands of web features that no longer require polyfilling or other gnarly workarounds, but also a huge win for the end users, who can now enjoy faster and more optimized experiences — many sites shipped same transpiled code to everyone..”
“and, a huge kudos to all the folks behind the scenes, both on the Chrome and Search side, that made it all possible. A long and multi-year journey that required deep architectural work in Chromium, layers upon layers of optimizations (scheduling, rendering, …), and…”
“an incredible amount of work to integrate and make it all run at (literal) web scale for Search rendering — turns out, “rendering the web” is no small feat. And, they pulled it all off with a seamless transition. It didn’t “just” go live, it’s been humming along for a while…”
Chrome isn’t the only product that will benefit from new Googlebot, since it is used across the board. Almost all Google services will se an increase in performance over it.
Kim Marks 
Nicola Holder