I've been closely following the intersection of web and AI this year, so who better to talk to about this than Jason Mayes, who leads Web AI initiatives at Google. For Google, Web AI is primarily abou...

Google's Jason Mayes argues that the web is the future of AI, not the cloud. He cites in-browser inference and LiteRT.js as key developments.

Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces.

2025 is a strange time to start a newsletter about web technology. The past four editions of WTN have focused on the intersection of the web and AI, because frankly that's where most of the excitement is on today's internet. But as a few people I link to this week point out, **the web platform has improved** to a point that it now does much of what frontend frameworks do. So why isn't there as much exciting activity to report on regarding the web platform? The problem, I think, is that web platform improvements are being undermined by AI development trends. I see two main issues: 1. The leading large language models, like GPT-5, are **defaulting to React and Next.js** when being asked to create web apps or sites. That entrenches the power that React has on the web development ecosystem, which means web platform improvements aren't being utilised by AI. Which leads to point #2... 2. I've heard both Vercel and Netlify (two of the leading web developer platforms) say in recent weeks that their user bases are massively increasing. Why? Because of vibe coders. The definition of a "developer" has expanded to include people who rely on prompting rather than programming. But the problem is that **vibe coders get fed React code instead of web-native code**. What's happening is that vibe coders ask their magic lamps to build an AI app or agent, and the AI genie gives them a React app in response. As Alex Russell noted when I tooted about the massive increase in vibe coding "developers" on Vercel and Netlify's platforms: "It's hard to think of this as anything but terrible news for users." I agree, and replied that it's analogous to what's happening to web content — AI slop is drowning out human-created content. None of this is good for the Web: worse content, worse code, worse Web. So what can we, the web technology community, do to promote web platform features over React code? Here are a few suggestions: 1. **Teach vibe coders to explicitly prompt for web-native solutions** (“use vanilla JS”, “no React”, “use HTML/CSS APIs”). 2. Find a way to get the LLMs to (dare I say it) ingest more web platform code — one way is to **build open datasets of framework-free web code** , and invite AI models to use that. 3. **Spotlight teams or projects that ship modern web experiences without heavy frameworks** — proving that the native platform is indeed ready. (This is definitely something WTN can help with, so please hit me up on Mastodon, Bluesky or LinkedIn if you know of such projects.) Ok, time to surf around the webtech-osphere. Let's start with some of the people who inspired this week's WTN theme... ## Web Platform 🌎 John Allsopp has a thoughtful post on how frontend frameworks (especially React) have become too much of a constraint on innovation, given the big improvements on the underlying web platform in recent years. Like me, John is more energized by AI Engineering than frontend these days. I would just note that web technology is a key part of AI development, so I am energized by that. But I do agree that framework fatigue is a real thing. John writes: > "But what aren’t we building? What new kinds of experiences, what new kinds of applications, what new kinds of interaction could we create if we were deeply exploring and engaging with the capabilities of the platform? I don’t know, because we’re not building them. We’re building what the frameworks enable us to build, what the assembly line can produce efficiently." 🌎 Jeremy Keith has a similar take, and further suggests that frameworks are often slow to adopt new web platform features: > "These days, client-side JavaScript frameworks don’t abstract away the underlying platform, they instead try to be an alternative. In fact, if you attempt to use web platform features, your JavaScript framework will often get in the way. You have to wait until your framework of choice supports a feature like view transitions before you get to use it. > > This is nuts. Developers are choosing to use tools that actively get in the way of the web platform." 🌎 Jeremy links to a Jim Nielsen post on the same topic, that specifically mentions @view-transition: > "Browser makers have teams of people who, day-in and day-out, are spending lots of time developing and optimizing new their offerings. > > So if you leverage what they offer you, that gives you an advantage because you don’t have to build it yourself." 🌎 Meanwhile, here's an unexpected use of slick web technologies... Apple has recreated the App Store on the Web! Although as MacStories points out, there is currently no way to download or buy apps on the web version. As an aside, for a brief time you could view the source code of the web App Store, which revealed the site was made with Svelte. However, that GitHub repository was then disabled due to a DMCA takedown notice (via Reddit). Apple App Store in the browser ## AI x Web 🤖 This week Microsoft Research launched an open source simulation environment for AI agents, called Magentic Marketplace. In advance of the release, I spoke to Ece Kamar, who manages the AI Frontiers Lab at Microsoft Research. Before the interview, I must admit I wasn’t sure why Microsoft would be releasing a simulated marketplace instead of the real thing. But Kamar convinced me that it’s not only sensible to fully test how agents collaborate before a public marketplace goes live, but it’s actually dangerous _not_ to run the simulations first! Microsoft's Magentic Marketplace for AI agents 🤖 Dennis Crowley, who founded Foursquare during Web 2.0, has a new startup called Hopscotch Labs. It's released BeeBot, "an app for AirPods" that combines AI, audio, and location-based social features; it's iPhone-only and US-only currently. (via Techmeme) 🤖 Vercel on what it's learned building agents: "The highest likelihood of success for current-generation agentic AI comes from work that requires low cognitive load and high repetition from humans." ## Open Social 🦣 Mastodon 4.5 has been released, featuring quote posts, a solution to missing replies, and native emoji support. There's also an updated roadmap. 🦋 Bluesky reaches 40 million users (note: there was no indication of how many are active). 🦋 Laurens Hof gives "an overview of the current state of blogging on atproto, and how it gives insight on what decentralisation on atproto actually looks like in practice". He mentions several blogging tools on AT Protocol, but Leaflet (where he wrote this post) is definitely the most interesting: > "Leaflet has quickly become the most popular blogging platform on atproto, and it is actively seeing further development. Leaflet is a block-based editor, that does not use markdown. Leaflet is now also starting to move towards the social side of blogging, with its own comment section (that exists outside of Bluesky), a reader feed that shows all recently published Leaflet posts, and a discovery page for finding other Leaflets." 🦣 Bonfire Social 1.0 has been released; it's a community-focused network on the fediverse. The group says: > "It's time to go beyond microblogging and build apps for community organising, open science, mutual aid, and collective decision‑making. Let's take back the internet with open protocols, consent‑based governance, and portability by design." 🦣 🦋 Bridgy Fed has rolled out two new features: DM to block multiple users at once and ATProto block list subscriptions. ## One More Thing 🎈 BBC reports that 'vibe coding' has been named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. While it's easy to scoff at this, someone on Bluesky pointed to this 1988 comment about HyperCard, the classic Apple dev tool: > "The beauty of HyperCard is that it lets people program without having to learn how to write code — what I call "programming for the rest of us"." Perhaps we're all developers after all! Although, I will always prefer the devs who can actually code. Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI. If you liked what you read today, please consider sharing the newsletter on your favorite social media platform. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

2025 is a strange time to start a newsletter about web technology. The past four editions of WTN have focused on the intersection of the web and AI, because frankly that's where most of the excitement...

Magentic Marketplace is a simulation environment for agentic markets, a new project from Microsoft to explore multi-agent collaboration.

Even in the middle of the dot-com bust in 2001, there are rays of hope: Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine launch, digital music turns legit with iTunes and the iPod, and blogging goes mainstream.

This week I spoke to Vercel’s Andrew Qu about the company’s recent experiments running a full Next.js application inside ChatGPT. OpenAI's apps were originally designed for relatively limited HTML pag...

After September 11, 2001, an influx of warblogs shakes up the blogosphere. It's part of a year-long transition in which blogging shifts from personal journaling to a more journalistic approach.

The big news this week was the launch of OpenAI's new browser, Atlas, which further validates my thesis that the web has become the UI layer for AI systems. Reactions to Atlas have been mixed (I have ...

A new project out of MIT is building open, decentralized infrastructure for AI agents as an alternative to proprietary platforms.

In October 2001, Brewster Kahle demonstrates a new time machine from the Internet Archive called the Wayback Machine. It will become a vital link between the Web's past and its present.

There's been a quiet inversion happening in internet technology: after a decade of smartphone apps dominance, the **web is becoming the default interface layer again**. Of course,**** this time it's for AI. I know many of you continue to be skeptical of AI and what it's doing to the open web (as I am too), but one thing we can hang onto is that web technology is a key part of the emerging AI stack. Consider: Google is baking AI directly into Chrome and Search, OpenAI is embedding web apps inside ChatGPT, and protocols like MCP-UI are standardizing how agents render web-based UIs. The web layer is where humans meet machines. For developers, that means the skills of the open web — **HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and frameworks like Vue and React** — are becoming the building blocks of AI experiences. For platforms, the real contest is the web layer — where AI meets the user. Google might still have the lead, but ChatGPT is a big player now and its newly announced app platform (Apps SDK) could well be a masterstroke. Plus, as you'll see below, Anthropic seems to be leading the charge on bridging technologies between AI and the Web — first with MCP, now with Skills. p.s. slight formatting change this week; from now on I'm using the _💡_ emoji to indicate my thoughts on a news item. ## Web Platform Opportunities 🌎 "React isn’t competing with other frameworks anymore. React has become the platform." Paul Kinlan, Google Chrome engineer, in a thoughtful blog post about what AI is doing to the web framework ecosystem. In short, making React even more popular! _💡 React’s dominance might be making it the de facto interface layer for AI-driven web apps. I don't actually like that trend, because I'd rather AI coding tools lean more towards native Web APIs. But, React does seem to be in an enviable position in terms of LLM 'knowledge'. Let's not call it a platform though!_ 🌎 At a frontend conference this month, Joeri Sebrechts showed how to port React applications to vanilla JavaScript. "It is a thing that pretty much nobody does for real but that is eminently doable," he said on Mastodon. Joeri posted his slides, which are worth perusing. 💡 _Now we're talking! Joeri Sebrechts’ demo is a reminder that AI-assisted dev tools can abstract away frameworks entirely...if prompted to._ 🌎 This week on The New Stack, I wrote about the launch of Vite+, a new unified JavaScript toolchain that aims to solve JavaScript fragmentation. The article includes quotes from my recent interview with Vite and Vue creator Evan You. 💡 _Vite+ aims to unify the scattered JavaScript toolchain — timely, as human devs and AI coding agents alike thrive on consistent build environments._ 🌎 The Web Components framework Lit is joining the OpenJS Foundation as an Impact Project, the project announced this week. 💡 _Lit joining the OpenJS Foundation helps position Web Components as a long-term standard. For businesses, that’s hopefully an encouraging sign to use WCs._ 🌎 Bramus from the Google Chrome team posted about what's new in view transitions, a new CSS feature that enables smooth animation between pages. MDN has a good overview. 💡 _The smooth navigation of View Transitions closes one of the last UX gaps between web apps and native apps — another quiet win for the browser._ ## AI x Web: Emerging Strategies 🤖 Anthropic has introduced "Agent Skills", which it defines as "folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed." The engineering blog adds: > "Skills extend Claude’s capabilities by packaging your expertise into composable resources for Claude, transforming general-purpose agents into specialized agents that fit your needs." Simon Willison thinks Skills could become even more important than MCP, which has arguably been the AI trend of the year (well, other than agents): > "I expect we’ll see a Cambrian explosion in Skills which will make this year’s MCP rush look pedestrian by comparison." 🤖 Cloudflare has updated Web Bot Auth, a protocol that "allows bots and agents to verify their identities to other parties using HTTP message signatures," and it is being extended for agentic commerce. Cloudflare provides the security infrastructure, while Visa, Mastercard, and American Express are all utilizing Web Bot Auth in their agentic commerce programs, says the company. 💡 _Payments players like Visa and Mastercard validating Cloudflare's protocol shows AI agent commerce is getting real. But, as noted last week, OpenAI and Shopify are also very active in this space — lots to work through yet._ 🤖 Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting spoke to Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen about the company's efforts to help publishers in the AI era. The goal is the Spotify model, Cohen told Morrissey. “There’s lots of money going to creators in that model… it took a while for that market to develop,” she said. 💡 _Cloudflare’s “Spotify model” for publishers hints at a future where AI platforms pay for licensed content access. That's the goal anyway, and I support it! Love the work Cloudflare is doing on this front._ 🤖 The Google Chrome team hosted an "AI in Action" technical workshop, to "demonstrate how client-side AI and built-in AI APIs can be directly integrated into their products..." 💡 _Chrome’s client-side AI push positions the browser as a local inference engine, not just a viewer — but we'll have to see how that affects web performance and privacy. I notice Firefox is pushing_ _similar technology_ _._ 🤖 Google Chrome also invites you to check out "the new Chrome DevTools Model Context Protocol (MCP) server," which it says "brings the power of Chrome DevTools to AI coding assistants." 🤖 Vercel has more details about running Next.js inside ChatGPT: > "When OpenAI announced the Apps SDK with Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, it opened the door to embedding web applications directly into ChatGPT. But there's a significant difference between serving static HTML in an iframe and running a full Next.js application with client-side navigation, React Server Components, and dynamic routing. This is the story of how we bridged that gap." 💡 _Vercel’s Next.js-in-ChatGPT integration shows that JS frameworks can run inside AI chat interfaces. If the ChatGPT apps platform does take off, Vercel wants to position itself as a dev environment for those apps._ 🤖 Interesting Fortune article about the 2025 trend for AI browsers. This about sums it up: > "The real prize for these companies isn’t web navigation; it’s control of the gateway to the rest of users’ digital lives, including a lot of other web-based software applications. Most companies are betting that the true value of AI will be unlocked when AI agents have access to a user’s entire ecosystem—emails, calendar, messages, and documents—and can perform tasks across them seamlessly." 💡 _This feels like Google's battle to win or lose, given the current dominance of Chrome (and its hold on Chromium), and the fact OpenAI seems to have pivoted to ChatGPT as the platform for apps (it had previously been rumored to be working on a browser). Still, there could be other winners here — Atlassian owns Dia now, one of these new AI browsers, so maybe that becomes a leading browser technology for enterprise AI apps._ ## Open Social Business 🦣 Why the open social web matters now; Ben Werdmuller posts the video and slides of his excellent FediForum keynote. 🦋 Leaflet, the blogging product running on AT Protocol, has a new Discover page showing off all the people using it. Accordingly, I subscribed to a bunch of leaflets; the process is a little confusing at first, but once you realize that you get a custom Bluesky feed of the sites you subscribe to (labelled "Leaflet Reader"), it makes sense! You can also read your feeds in Leaflet's product. My Leaflet Reader in Bluesky 💡 _Leaflet’s new Discover page shows early signs of a decentralized content network forming on Bluesky’s protocol — small, messy, but growing._ 🎸 Music dev Lee Martin has a post about Spotify's new API restrictions and finding practical alternatives. He explains on Hacker News: > "A lot has changed on the Spotify Web API in the past year: deprecated features, increased security, and steep new criteria for extended access, which alienates indie apps. Rather than complain about it, I've put together a report to understand these new restrictions and find practical alternatives." 💡 _Spotify’s tightening API access mirrors a pattern: when platforms mature, indie innovation gets squeezed. Open standards are the only long-term defense._ ## One More Thing 🎈 The political blog Talking Points Memo turns 25 shortly, and to celebrate it is running a series of posts on the history of digital media. I really enjoyed a post by Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker.com, entitled What Made Blogging Different?. This bit near the end especially resonated with me: > “I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.” Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI. I'm still in the early phase of this project, so please share the newsletter on your favorite social media platform. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging! _Feature image via Unsplash._

There's been a quiet inversion happening in internet technology: after a decade of smartphone apps dominance, the web is becoming the default interface layer again. Of course, this time it's for AI. ...

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Vite creator Evan You explains how Vite+, a new unified JavaScript toolchain, will solve JavaScript fragmentation — especially for dev teams.

With the announcement of iTunes in January 2001, Apple CEO Steve Jobs ushers in the legal digital music era. It also marks the beginning of Apple's renaissance as a Silicon Valley pioneer.

This week we saw the launch of a new application platform: OpenAI's ChatGPT apps, including a platform for third-party developers to submit apps to be embedded in ChatGPT. Most intriguing for web tech...