Serverless functions are fairly straightforward. Put a bit of back-end language code, like Node, in the cloud and communicate with it via URL. But what if that URL didn’t run a back-end language, it ran an actual browser? Richard Young:

We can now do full stack development using just Web APIs. Need to read/write network resources? Use the fetch API. Need to cache some data? Use localStorage. Need to blur an image? Use a CSS filter on an img tag. Need to manage sessions? Use cookies. Need multi-threading? Use Web Workers. Need native compiled speed (or a language other than JavaScript)? Use WebAssembly.

Clever. Browsers are getting so capable it makes sense to leverage the things they are good at.

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