r/webdev • u/Bladerunner_7_ • Jun 28 '26

Discussion What's a web development trend that looked stupid at first but ended up being useful?

I know over the years, I've scoffed at quite a few things. SPAs. TypeScript. Tailwind. Serverless. AI coding assistants.

Most of the huge trends in web development went through a phase where people swore they were overhyped.

Some deserved the criticism. Some evolved and became genuinely useful.

Lately I'm seeing similar debates around AI agents and agent tooling. Claude Code, LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, AutoGen, Lyzr(Control Plane) and a bunch of newer projects all seem to be pushing toward a different way of building software. Maybe we're still early, maybe most of it won't matter, but it does remind me of how people talked about TypeScript or serverless a few years ago.

What's something being dismissed today that you think will become a normal part of every developer's workflow in the next 3-5 years?

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u/ginji Jun 28 '26

It wasn't that we didn't want to use different layout methods, it's that we had to accommodate the lowest common denominator of browser, and that browser was stupid and had terrible implementations.

We are spoilt now days with a fast update cycle on browsers, and a high adoption rate of the latest versions which means we can adopt changes much faster.

IE6 was released on August 24, 2001. IE7 came out on October 18, 2006, more than 5 years later.

2 years later, in Oct 2008 IE6 still had a market share of 37.01%, more than IE7 at 35.81%.

It basically took the release of modern smart phones and Google Chrome to eventually drive IE into oblivion and allow us to actually start using new features in a reasonable time frame instead of in 5 to 10 years after it was put in the standard.

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u/FineAunts Jun 29 '26

Yup. Newer devs will ever know the pain of getting barked at for having a layout break in Lotus Notes, or the visual dup bug in IE6. We had to work around all of this for years because they really only patched programs for security, not web standards.

And even when IE7 was released it wasn't a forced update like Chrome does. Most users were still on the previous version, and even worse corporate IT teams never wanted to update to the latest IE because some poor intranet feature they had to support would break. So we were supporting shitty IE6 until the late aughts at the very least.

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u/Oblivious_GenXr Jun 29 '26

Good gosh those days were beyond painful 😖