The Web is Awesome in 2025
A bit late, but happy 2025! As I look back to when I started my career, I can't help but be very impressed with how far the web has come. It's a great time to be a frontend engineer. It seems as though web features have really accelerated in the last 3-4 years across all browsers. It's very cool to see.
And it looks like they aren't letting off the accelerator. Interop 2025 is looking great. Their dashboard can be found here. I'm really excited about everything on the list, but in particular I'm most excited about anchor positioning and view transitions getting support across all browsers.
Anchor positioning will help me build tooltips and popovers without floating UI. View Transitions will help with animations and making the web feel more like native apps. This example is one of my favorites — this is the type of interaction you see on a mobile device. Same for this credit card example. Danny Moerkerke did such an excellent job with these and posted them on codepen (thank you!). These are SO GOOD! And exactly what I'm excited about with view transitions.
Another thing I'm interested in for this year is the Navigation API and how it might change the way we build web apps in the near future. It doesn't necessarily affect me much day to day in my current work, but I'm really interested to see how it develops and what changes come from it.
And these items are only from Interop! There is a ton of work going on that isn't on this list. With Custom Elements / Web Components in particular, I'm really excited for Scoped Custom Element Registries, cross shadow-root aria, and many other enhancements. Temporal is another thing I'm very excited about — dealing with dates, times, and timezones in JavaScript is such a pain, but Temporal is promised to be a huge improvement and is coming soon™. I'm super pumped for customizable Select as well.
I'm very thankful for everyone doing the work to make web tech better every year. Thank you all! And I can't wait to see where we're at with things this time next year.
👋