I believe that the Headless Web is the future. Being able to offer users experiences that are delivered via the web, but without actually ever seeing a traditional browser. There are a couple of manifestations of the headless web: Notification based experiences, such as those that delivered the news of Brexit; Deep media integration allowing you to control videos and audio through controls that extend on to connected devices such as watches and Media surfaces in the host operating sysetem; or the most powerful of them all, the ability to run a web browser on the server.

I believe the introduction of Headless Chrome and the Puppeteer API can power the next generation of web businesses or commandline tools. With a browser running on the server we can fetch and execute any content that lives on the web through a simple server side set of integrations.

Puppeteer As A Service, or PuppeteerAAS, is a simple example of some of the things that you can do with the Puppeteer API. It lets you take screenshots, traces, print pdfs, server-side render dynamic pages.

The very first version of this was a bit of a hack-job, and the awesome Eric Bidelman hopped in and quickly improved the entire project and has made it what it is today.

Some interesting things: It’s hosted on zeit.co using their Docker based deployment scripts. This works really well for me, because I don’t have to think about any of the infrastructure and deploying it is as simple as now.

One neat example is the bookmarklet I created that takes the current page that you are on, runs a deep performance trace of the page via PuppeteerAAS and then sends the results to a hosted version of Chrome DevTools.

Try it out with this page. It’s very neat.