Browser APIs: The Web’s Free SaaS

Authentication on the web is a complicated problem. If you’re going to do it yourself, there’s a lot you have to take into consideration.

But odds are, you’re building an app whose core offering has nothing to do with auth. You don’t care about auth. It’s an implementation detail.

So rather than spend your precious time solving the problem of auth, you pay someone else to solve it.

That’s the value of SaaS.

What would be the point of paying for an authentication service, like workOS, then re-implementing auth on your own? They have dedicated teams working on that problem. It’s unlikely you’re going to do it better than them and still deliver on the product you’re building.

There’s a parallel here, I think, to building stuff in the browser.

Browsers provide lots of features to help you deliver good websites fast to an incredibly broad and diverse audience.

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.

You could build it yourself. You could say “No thanks, I don’t want what you have. I’ll make my own.”

But you don’t have to. And odds are, whatever you do build yourself, is not likely to be as fast as the highly-optimized subsystems you can tie together in the browser.

And the best part? Unlike SasS, you don’t have to pay for what the browser offers you.

And because you’re not paying, it can’t be turned off if you stop paying.

@view-transition, for example, is a free API that’ll work forever.

That’s a great deal. Are you taking advantage?