State of the Browser 2025

Published March 30, 2025 by Maureen Holland

One of the joys of working in web development is a lot of content relevant to your interests ends up, well, on the Web. In particular, a lot of conferences offer online tickets. 99 times out of 100, I go online. But yesterday, I attended State of the Browser in person.

Imposter syndrome and social anxiety were my primary emotions on arrival. I wondered if I had made a huge mistake. But over the course of the day, the voices telling me I shouldn't be there diminished and I was able to approach people I didn't know and say hello. Everyone I met was truly lovely. It's been a long time since I walked into a large room of strangers and walked out with friends.

As expected, the talks were excellent. Here's a quick breakdown:

Ladybird: Building a new browser from scratch, Andreas Kling

The browser world is currently dominated by a single engine: Blink (from Google). Many modern browsers have chosen to build on top of it, which gives them a leg up on development but ultimately puts users at risk of vendor lock-in. So when Ladybird says they are building a browser based on web standards rather than an existing engine, it's a big deal. All of the full-time developers currently working on the project came from their contributor community and they are on track to have an Alpha release ready for 2026.

To `light-dark()` or Not To `light-dark()`, Niya Dobazova

The takeaway here was, however you do it, you should respect a user's preference of light or dark color scheme. Folks with astigmatism, low-vision, or dyslexia might find a light theme easier to read while those with cataracts, migraines or photophobia might find a dark theme better for focus. As users hop around the Web, having some sites respect their preference while others don't is likely to be frustrating if not headache-inducing. Support for the light-dark() is relatively recent cross-browser but there are other techniques available. As a peek into future CSS, the idea of a more general schemed-value() function is in discussion.

How do we keep going wrong? Roundabouts and APIs, Josh Tumath

Expanding a system (whether road or web-based) while keeping good UX is difficult. Josh shared a great quote from Lea Verou: "Common things should be easy, complex things should be possible.". In this case, "easy" is aimed at the users of the API, not the developers of it. Sometimes, the internals can get a bit funky but as long as the API surface remains clean, you've got the right priorities in place. Also a great tip, consider how your component might evolve. Your future self might thank you for setting up that property with an enum value rather than a boolean.

Color in CSS: How I learned to disrespect Tennis, Manuel Matuzović

Okay, real quick I just need to you watch the first minute or so of this video so it can be stuck in your head too.

Now let's dive into the wonderful world of CSS color. We have access to wider color gamuts through new color spaces and modern display capabilities, but what does any of that actually mean? My high-level understanding of this is that gamuts are the range of colors available and spaces are the way they are shaped so that each color can be reliably identified. If you look at this OKLCH color picker, you'll get an idea of what I mean by "shape". oklch() is considered a wide-gamut color space because you have access to more colors than you do with the more familiar rgb() and hsl() color spaces. This is barely scratching the surface of what was covered. Luckily, you can check out the Beyond Tellerrand version of Manuel's talk.

Mindful Design for Developers, Scott Riley

I think the slide that's going to stay with me the most is: "Code exploration is just as important as design exploration". There are so many decisions developers make in the implementation of a design that it is better for everyone if we start early and communicate often about the experience we're trying to create. It should be an experience that supports the user's sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness (following self-determination theory). If you're interested in learning more about this approach, I'd recommend checking out Scott's book, Mindful Design.

Whimsica11y: bringing the joy and whimsy to everyone, Sara Joy

Whimsica11y is a project Sara started to make web accessibility more accessible to hobbyists (no one really wants to parse the official WCAG website). The irony of guidance about accessibility not being accessible to a lot of people is not lost on me. This was a talk with more questions than answers but they were very thought-provoking questions. Why is so much of the whimsy on the Web visual in nature? What could auditory whimsy sound like? Maybe the secret synthesizer on Josh Comeau's site or Keenan's audioblog? For what it's worth, a lot of respondents to Sara's Mastodon poll said they would be delighted if a website just worked for them. Oof. We've got some work to do to raise the floor on accessibility.

Typographer vs. Accessibility, Oliver Schöndorfer

This was the final talk of the day and what perfect placement. I was so tired at this point, it was hard to imagine there was room in my brain for any more information. Oliver broke through the end-of-day fog with what was essentially a one-man-show as much as a conference talk. A few dramatic scenes, techno music breaks, and audience polls later, I had a much better understanding of what to consider from an accessibility perspective when choosing a font and setting the type. You want fonts to follow feeling and function. Text should be legible and readable. I'm going to start paying a lot more attention to how different fonts handle the following characters: Il1 eco 0OC dbqp. I don't know if he's still touring (it's worth seeing live), but for an idea of the experience, you can check out the Beyond Tellerrand edition of Oliver's show.

Wrapping Up

Very full, very fulfilling day. I'm planning to return in person next year and I've already bought a ticket for All Day Hey!, May 1st. Maybe I'll see you there?

More community conferences! (Buy tickets early)

(I'm definitely missing one and it's going to bother me. There were 7 talks and a conference mentioned before each talk. Let me know on Mastodon if you can fill in the gap)

Update: the missing conference has been added! Thanks to London Web Standards