Extending completed Priority Hints origin trial

[Patrick Meenan]

Is it possible to extend a "completed" origin trial?  

The original trial for priority hints didn't collect the desired feedback on the API surface and a launch decision couldn't be made at the time. Now that there is intense developer focus on improving Core Web Vitals (LCP in particular) I'd like to re-start the trial and have set up conversations with devrel and agencies to gather the necessary feedback.

During the original trial, the engagements were mostly focused on boosting the priority of async scripts used by frameworks but there was already a hack in place that they were using that achieved similar results. This time around the feedback cycle will largely be focused on boosting the priority of image elements to improve sites Largest Contentful Paint and there has been pretty intense developer demand for being able to do that so feedback will be much easier to get.

There are some slight improvements made to the underlying code that will be landing in 96 but there haven't been any fundamental changes to the API or base capabilities since the original trial.

I sent out the intent to extend the trial on Friday and I can ping API owners to get the sign-off this week but I'm mostly wondering about the mechanics.

Does it need to be a new trial? If so, does it get a new name? Priority Hints is the W3C spec name and it would be cleanest if we could re-use the same field trial name for when people request OT tokens.

If it can re-use the existing, completed OT, go/extend-origin-trial doesn't show "Priority Hints" in the feature name as an option to extend, presumably because it "completed".

Thanks,

-Pat

[Jason Chase]

It is possible to extend a completed origin trial. With a new end date, we can enable signups again for the existing trial.

Based on advice from the API owners, I see you filed an intent for a new trial: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/CkRq2zY-t6c.

In this case, I recommend starting a new trial, because it has been a long time since the last trial (~2 years). It makes less sense to consider this a continuation. To address the naming, we could do something like "Priority Hints V2". Not ideal, but we've done that in the past for other trials.

If the implementation is using the same runtime flag, it will require an update to the origin_trial_feature_name. The OT dashboard doesn't allow the origin_trial_feature_name to be reused on different trials.

Thanks,

Jason