Progressive Web Apps are the table stakes. They allow us to play in the same game as native experiences and get users experiencing a web that is first class. We need to introduce users to the fact that these experiences can be fast, reliable, robust and available everywhere that they expect it to be. Progressive Web Apps give us the platform to build on top of.

Service Worker will play a huge part in the future of the Headless Web for experiences that live and are surfaced directly up through the users devices but powered and delivered by HTML and JavaScript. This will give us new products entirely built around Notification based interfaces and other future platform pieces that are integrated in with Service Workers.

Headless browsers will help power the back-end by allowing us to aggregate information and more easily extract meaning from the web as a whole and by running it through an engine that can understand the page content but also the logic that is being executed on it too.

Custom Elements combined with Headless Browsers will bring back the composability of the web and enable our hosted content to be portable and flourish everywhere, be it natively embedding microcontent from web into Apps or the creation of Micro Web Views or even by parsing the data on a server somewhere. We lost something when native came along and I think we can show the power of the web by creating portable data and logic. Custom Elements are the key to this future of composability on the web (I am going to write this up a little more). Fundamentally Custom Elements allow us to define HTML Tags which through a consistently defined developer interface the functionality can be replaced by any native element or other web implementation.

To enable the next generation of remote services powered by a headless browser, we need to fix the scale issues. We’ve been running these tools as individual instances of the browser to run our test suites. We need to get scale at being able to run hundreds, if not thousands of instances of the browser. Someone needs to build this! If we can get a scaled and generalised solution to running a browser in the cloud then we have a very compelling new platform for large scale aggregation of data on the web.

I am very excited by the future of the web, all that I know though is that it won’t look like what it looks like today, but I want it to be powered by URLs and content that is directly addressable and available to every person in the world. We need to have a great experience on that content directly, but that content needs to be portable on to every platform where the users are and usable in what ever User Agent they use.

If we can provide a world where content and utility on that content are available headlessly then I think we are in a good position.