966: A Look Back at Web Dev in 2025

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Wes Bos

Tech News, Technology, News

4.9 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wes and Scott revisit their 2025 web development predictions, grading hits and misses across AI, browsers, frameworks, CSS, and tooling. From Temporal and AI coding agents to React, Vite, and vanilla CSS, they reflect on what actually changed, what stalled, and what it all means heading into 2026. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 866: 2025 Web Development Predictions 01:26 Temporal API will ship in the browser 03:33 On-device AI becomes common 06:14 WebGPU unlocks fast local machine learning TypeGPU 07:10 Models will plateau 10:32 Is there an actual use case for video and photo gen AI? 13:27 Text to UI tools get really good 16:25 Framework choice will matter less 18:53 Web components in Standard Stack, Web Awesome takes off 21:37 AI browsers and Copilot Workspace-style tools will become normal 22:56 AI browsera will become inevitable, OpenAI will launch a browser 27:51 Relative color will feel fully “safe to use” 29:02 Vanilla CSS will make a comeback 30:33 Brought to you by Sentry.io 30:58 CSS mixins and functions spec solidifies CSS Custom Functions and Mixins Module Level 1 33:25 Container style queries will ship everywhere CSS if statements 35:40 Vertical centering jokes will stubbornly persist 36:20 VS Code will reach feature parity with Cursor 38:47 More VS Code forks will appear 39:46 React Compiler drops Babel 40:34 React server components will pop 42:17 Remix re-emerges as something new 43:17 React Native will have its time 44:21 TanStack Start and Tanstack will pop 45:46 SvelteKit gets more granular data loading 46:06 Local first apps will take off 46:43 Bun keeps doing “wild but loved” non-standard features, Bun will launch a platform-as-a-service 48:22 Vite stays king 51:07 Laravel will release a CMS 52:44 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: DARKBEAM Flashlight UV Black Light Wes: WOOZOO Fan Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Syntax. We've got two episodes for you coming up in the next week. Today we have
0:06.4	our reviewing our 2025 predictions. So every single year, what we do is we look at where web
0:13.5	development is and we say these are our predictions for the next year. What's going to happen?
0:18.2	What's going to flop? What's going to pop? And we are going to go through
0:22.2	all of our predictions today and say, did we hit it or did we not? And then next Wednesday, we'll
0:27.3	have another episode, which is our predictions for 2026 as to what's going to happen. So my name is
0:33.3	West Boss. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas, everybody. Hopefully you're enjoying it. This is going to be a really
0:37.9	fun episode. I'm here with Scott. Toulinski, how you doing today, Scott? Hey, I'm doing good. Did you just
0:43.8	come up with that did it flop or did it not on the fly just now? I'm just genius. Yeah,
0:50.2	I just have an incredible intuition and all of that. Oh, yeah. No, that's great. I like that a lot. Did it flop or did it not? That's a great metric. I think we can all live by here. Did it flop or did it pop? Flop or pop? I love these episodes because this is the thing I like doing the most, just pontificating on like theoretical, who knows what, is this going to happen or not?
1:12.6	I feel like I'm always a little too optimistic on stuff.
1:15.6	So I have to say last year, last year we had a lot of like, man, we were a little too optimistic on that.
1:23.6	But I have to say that this year we, we nailed quite a bit.
1:26.6	So let's get on into the first one, which was the Temporal API will ship in the browser.
1:33.5	So I said both Chrome and Safari will ship by end of year.
1:37.3	And Scott said that it will be in at least one browser.
1:41.8	So if you haven't heard of it, temporal is this massive API
1:45.7	that is set to replace the date API.
1:49.4	You might be saying, well,
1:50.1	what's wrong with the data API?
1:51.6	Stop changing stuff.
1:52.8	I don't know if anybody's ever said,
	...

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