Web Fragments Rationale
Last updated: March 18, 2025
What’s radically different about Web Fragments?
Unlike other micro-frontend technologies, Web Fragments focus on isolating individual micro-frontends from each other by executing their client-side JavaScript in separate JavaScript context, while enabling them to share the same DOM document, browser navigation and history.
Just like Docker enables containerization of applications, Web Fragments enable containerization of web frontends on the client-side, and by extension also on the server-side.
This JavaScript execution context isolation and low-overhead virtualization enables large monolithic web frontends to be broken up into smaller, independently developed and released web applications, that in production are composed into a single cohesive UI. In this way Web Fragments enable scaling and incremental modernization of the frontend tech stack.
Pushing the Web forward
Our long term goal is to help push the Web forward, which requires not only creating new architectures and technologies, but also enabling large applications to adopt them.
Enterprise frontends have historically lacked technological mobility. Due to their size, risk-aversion, and inability to incrementally migrate from the past “state-of-the-art” tech stack or architecture to the current one, enterprise frontends have always been several generations behind on the latest frontend technology, often forgoing major developer experience and user experience advancements.
Web Fragments enable enterprises to modernize and scale their web frontends, with only minimal overhead, and no vendor lock-in.