WebTransitions

A research and development lab for experiments in the web platform, browsers, and what comes after them.

Changing the web is hard, and for good reasons. But it should not be impossible, or the web itself cannot grow and change with the needs of the people who use it.

The fastest way to find out whether a change should or could happen is to build it and try it. Experimentation on the web has long required decades of expertise and a lot of time and space. Much of that barrier is falling, and the questions worth asking are getting bigger: not just which features browsers should ship, but what using the web looks like when the browser as we know it is no longer the default way in.

WebTransitions is a laboratory for those questions. Each experiment is small, opinionated, and built to be learned from.

Experiments

• Peek: An experimental web user agent. It started as a browser extension exploring persistent versus transient task modeling (tabs versus panels), and is now a workbench for exploring what comes after browsers in many different ways. What is using the web like with no tabs? With AI, but no model prompt?
• Singular: How can web pages be made weightless? Every page carries load that has nothing to do with its content: cognitive and emotional load, trust decisions at several levels, maintenance costs, install decisions. Experiments include:
  • Opening pages without any browser branding at all, because the cognitive and emotional load of browser choice is not zero.
  • Opening pages from the point of view of the publisher, the way they would want them to be opened.
  • Opening pages that run as standalone apps.
  • Opening pages as standalone apps that are never installed, and disappear completely when closed.
• Szzt: Drag and drop publishing of web pages on atproto, openable by any renderer or gateway, with different render contexts. How might a page be created and published without needing a domain name? An experiment in being discovered, verified and served through an atproto identity.
• Bez: An experiment in a spec-generated web engine, authored entirely by local AI models.

More experiments are on the way.

Previous work

• (2026) EU Cyber Resilience Act draft standard for Standalone and Embedded Browsers: Subject matter expert hired by Crab Nebula to participate in authoring, review, and comment resolution. Collaborated with stakeholders, policy makers and browser vendors to synthesize EU regulatory requirements and web standards into a document that balances the needs of each, while being as future-proof as possible.
• (2026) The Servo Readiness Report (PDF), a report-in-progress evaluating how far Servo is from being a usable web engine, and what amount of funding would get it usable sooner, with an aim to inform planning for a non-US multi-stakeholder governed web engine for use by everyone.
• (2018-∞) Custom scheme support in browsers: Since co-creating the Libdweb project at Mozilla in 2018, over nearly 5yrs working on P2P support in browsers at Protocol Labs, and getting bugs fixed, standards revised, and even major refactors in Chromium, still pushing on reducing barriers to enabling a multi-protocol web. Kicked off while leading the Browsers & Platforms team at PL, currently advising Igalia and the IPFS Fdn on an ongoing initiative to get custom scheme support into web extension manifests, and to follow that with backing those schemes with byte streams, not just extension-bundled HTML pages.
• (2022-5) Ed25519 support in the Web Cryptography API: Kicked this off while at Protocol Labs, continued advising the project generally and directly getting vendor movement over 3+ years before all three engines finally shipped it in release versions in 2025 (Igalia post, IPFS Fdn post).
• (2024-5) Web Features Project: Spent six months working in the W3C Web DX CG on behalf of Google, creating web feature definitions which let us reason about the web platform as ~1200 discrete features vs 15k+ unique pieces. These are used by MDN, Caniuse, Visual Studio, and many more.
• (2016-∞) @Intenttoship: Bot that posts when browser makers announce an intent to ship, change or remove features in their web engines.

Areas of research

• Experimental user agents and post-browser interfaces
• Task modeling: tabs, panels, and what replaces them
• AI in the user agent, beyond the chat prompt
• Reducing the cost of opening, trusting and keeping web pages
• Publishing and identity without domain names
• atproto, decentralized and distributed web
• Non-HTTP protocols, multiprotocol support
• Spec-driven and AI-authored web engines
• Portable and resilient web apps
• Verifiability / provenance
• Web form factor / OS integration / webviews

Who

After many years working towards paradigmatic change on the web at Mozilla and Protocol Labs, WebTransitions was formed by Dietrich Ayala as a not-for-profit organization (pending) to enable experimentation and innovation on the web platform.

Working or worked with these fine folks, among others:

Google, Mozilla, Apple, Igalia, CrabNebula, Protocol Labs, IPFS Foundation, Little Bear Labs, IPShipyard, Open Impact Foundation, Brave, Peergos and more.

Writing

1. Hello from the new site October 2026

Collaborate

Interested in these experiments, running one of your own, or connecting with others working on what comes after browsers? See userandagents.org for how to connect and collaborate.

Or email hello@webtransitions.org.