# Stakes of the Game
Anyone who's been in the web development space for some time and has played a part in shipping Service Workers to a production website will likely agree that Service Workers are one of the most powerful pieces of web technology that has come around in recent years. Its inception gave web developers an unprecedented sense of power and control over things that were simply not possible on the web before. Perhaps a long-drawn and weird analogy, but much like the invention of the handgun, one could argue that its repercussions would lead on in many ways to break the antecedent "natural order of things", only in this case in the world of web applications and how their experiences are authored, controlled and served to the user.
Much of this is owed to the quintessential nature of a Service Worker acting as a programmable network proxy (opens new window) which resides within a user's browser for a particular website, "programmable" being really the keyword to focus on here.
There is a whole lot of other things that Service Workers are capable of, such as enabling Push Notifications (opens new window), Background Sync (opens new window) or Periodic Background Sync (opens new window) and so on, and combined together with other APIs like Web App Manifest (opens new window) Service Workers allow us to build web experiences that start resembling native apps in some (albeit limited) ways, collectively building towards the whole notion of Progressive Web Apps (opens new window). In this article, our main focus however still lies in the programmable network proxy aspects of it.
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