More than just thumbnails, micro-browsers are everywhere

That's a lot of verbiage to describe a basic http request. I suppose it would make sense if the author is unfamiliar with curl, request, httpclient, etc. and trying to reason it in terms of what they know (regular browsers).

I don't think it's a great term though, first because it has been used in the past to describe dumb phone browsers with limited functionality but that still renders a page. The important distinction being that rendering happens.

Second, these are parsing metadata found in the page. It's actually much much closer to a bot than a browser and perhaps best described in those terms. It's a bot that only wants to figure out a preview for a target URL. Preview bot.

wait, arent these previews just images? whenever I worked on making these previews work with twitter, telegram etc I used opengraph tags (and similar) or dynamically created them (react).