I remember thinking last November (2016 if you're reading this from the future), while watching speakers at the Chrome Dev Summit, that Google remembered how important the web was several times. Not the internet where data files back and forth, but the web, the part of that internet you see through a web browser.

Whether you're using Chrome or another program that is built for seeing all the things on the web, or a component in another app that can show you a part of the web that's meaningful and relevant to what you're doing right this moment, the web is a powerful medium for all things. It's also one of the first user experiences we all had and our children may have.

The web was was the first look at what we call User Experience for all things tech.

OK, maybe remember isn't the right word here. Google has spent countless amounts of money and time building tools to both make the web and see the web. The Chrome browser has gone from an amateurish side project into a full-fledged operating system that's so well connected it just works no matter where your things are (or where an apps things are) in the world as long as they are on a server.

Chrome OS leverages the internet — all the tubes and data pipes that put almost anything digital within our reach — and uses the web as a way for us to see and hear it all. Terms like "online" and "offline" can blur in Chrome OS because almost every user interface is a web page and everything these apps can do is done the same way as a web page 10,000 miles away would do it.

There are a lot of amazing things happening at Google that are overshadowed by Android.

It has also been very busy adopting existing and building new web standards, making it easier for anyone to distribute everything through the internet with a friendly web interface and trying to get the internet to more places so more people can be a part of the web and everything else it has to offer. Google has not sat idly by whilst it watches Android slowly become the dominant computing platform in the world. It's been busy preparing for what's next and laying the foundation for what comes after what's next.

And we got to see a glimpse of what's next through a short post on the Chromium blog about Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). The web can become a global app store and our phones can be a tool to see a web interface that can do almost anything.