After 2 years since we launched the last version, I'm super excited to share Microlink 3.0 with you – the most ambitious release until now. This release includes not only many improvements, but also a bunch of new cool stuff. The entire product has been redesigned, including the mission, so I want to use this space to take an overview of everything that has been shipped until today. Let me give you a bit of backstory.

The origin

My name is Kiko Beats and I'm a JavaScript programmer that likes to do stuff. I've published +400 packages, counting more than 350M downloads per month. Back in 2018, Microlink started as an API service that offers to get metadata for any URL. Eventually, the product grew and it was able to take screenshots or generate PDFs on demand. That started to scale quickly (no meme), serving nowadays more than 8 million requests per month. You can see monthly live stats on the main website. In order to support that, some key features were added, such as Microlink Cache Layer or Microlink CDN for assets, which now are a being part of the product tier offer. It's explained deeply at https://microlink.io/blog/edge-cdn.

The inflection point

The more feedback users gave us about the product, the more quickly I realized that the real product is the browser.

At that moment, the product just provided a tiny subset of common browser workflows.

By making the browser the main product to offer, we were able to activate a lot more interesting use cases, like running Lighthouse on the cloud, getting the rendered markup of any website, or extracting specific data over a target URL.

These are just examples. Any browser workflow can be eventually done by Microlink.

You could think of Microlink as a cloud of browsers solution: we provide you the necessary infrastructure to run a full securitized cloud browser, forwarding you back the result in a cost-effective way, being no worried about auto-scaling, load balancers, or paying for capacity you don't use.

What's new

All the product has been redesigned to accomplish the new mission: Microlink is a remote browser that can be accessed via API. Fundamentally, Microlink 3.0 enables the appropriate space to explore every browser workflow you can do. Special mention to Microlink API documentation (https://microlink.io/docs/api/ge...), where you can see all the underlying things can be set at the browser level. Also, most of the software running under Microlink is open source, so you can run it as a standalone solution if you want. Check it at https://microlink.io/oss!