863: 2024: A Year in Review

Scott and Wes look back at 2024 and share highlights from a big year for Syntax and the web dev world. They review their 2024 predictions to see what they got right (and wrong), and break down the major moments in web development from CSS improvements to AI editors and beyond. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:30 Changes to the Syntax podcast. 05:56 What happened this year? 06:07 React. 06:36 Solid Start. 07:04 Tanstack Start. 07:43 Remix 09:42 AI Editors. 11:53 Vite 6. 14:02 Bluesky. 19:52 CSS. 22:17 What did we do? 22:21 React Miami. React Miami Episode. 22:26 JSNation Amsterdam. 23:55 JSNation US + React Summit. 24:57 Terminal Feud. 26:28 Laravel + Terminal basketball game. 27:02 Syntax San Francisco meetup. 27:23 GitHub Universe. 28:07 FITC. 28:38 153 Syntax Episodes + Video. 29:32 Our 2024 Predictions Reviewed. 29:46 Types in JS will have real movement. 31:29 Temporal API will ship in 1 browser. 32:50 Perf tooling gets easy for everyone to understand. 33:29 CSS continues to get better where you need less JS. 34:25 Svelte v5 is very fast. 34:38 The year of the server in frameworks. 35:28 Astro is going to have a good year. 36:13 React server components. 37:03 Remix moves away from page-based loaders, to component loaders. 37:18 Hono will become more ubiquitous. 38:28 We will see a route matching Proposal move ahead. 39:23 Bun releases full node compat. 40:42 We will see a new Linter + formatter entirely replace. 42:16 New TypeScript typechecker. Ezno. 43:40 Lightning CSS pops - or does it? 45:10 You’ll hear more about Rspack and Turbopack. 45:51 Vite isn’t going to release anything big in 2024. 46:24 Relative color will land in all major browsers. 48:14 CSS contrast-color will land in chrome. 48:48 Scroll animation landing in 2 browsers. 50:03 The year of CSS discovery. 51:09 Safari will Ship 3 missing PWA Support. 52:11 Firefox usage will continue to slip. 56:53 Paid Arc features. 57:14 More XR web experiences as Apple releases in Vision Pro. 59:55 AI Tooling. 01:00:57 Small Models that run in the browser. 01:01:38 Apps get Sherlocked by OpenAI. 01:02:04 On prem corporate AI. 01:04:49 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs. Sick Picks Scott: TCGPocket App. Wes: Huge Bag of Croc Charms Shameless Plugs Scott: Syntax on YouTube. 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. This is our 2024, a year in review. We're going to take a look back at what happened this year in, in web development in general. What did we do as a, as a podcast? And most importantly, we're going through our predictions. So every year, at the beginning of the year, we predict what will happen. And we'll take a look at if we got some of those very, very wrong. And some of them, we were, we were bang on. So I'm excited to, to get into that. My name is Wes. I'm a developer from Canada. With me as always is Scott. How you doing Scott?

• 0:33Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, hey, man. I'm doing good. Right now at our house, this is the second week in, in less than a month where we have some kind of stomach bug going around. First, it was one kid. And we all kind of came out unscathed, if not for a little like sore tummies and stuff. But man, we got a whole other, whole different stomach bug. You know, probably came from a birthday party or something. We took our kids to and it is, it is tough. It is tough to have to wake up to clean up after like kids several, several nights. It is rough. It is rough. So yeah, I'm feeling a little bit. I'm feeling that, that aspect

• 1:15Scott Tolinski?

  of it. But hey, I'm here. I'm doing good. We recently got back from a couple of conferences and I'm going to Disney soon. So it's just like, I'm feeling in a good place. Good way to cap off the end of the year. Right? How are you feeling?

• 1:30Wes Bos?

  I'm feeling great. I'm, I'm excited for 2025 and excited for all the stuff we have planned. Actually, maybe let's talk about that right then. And there is, we have some changes coming to the syntax lineup, not the lineup, the types of content we are creating. So we are going to go down from three podcasts a week down to two a week. And the podcasts are going to be traditionally what we do is we do a hasty on Monday, a tasty on Wednesday, and a guest on Friday. What we're going to do now is simply Make the podcast as long as it needs to be for the content and not stick to a specific

• 2:12Wes Bos?

  type on every single day. So you can look forward to that. And then that's going to free us up to do a little bit more video. So we've got all kinds of ideas of YouTube stuff that we can do, right Scott?

• 2:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 2:24Wes Bos?

  Pretty excited about all of it. And we're gonna start cooking on all of those things. And that should be on Friday, right?

• 2:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. So, you know, even give some background on this is,

• 2:35Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Scott Tolinski?

  You know, when the podcast first started out, we just did one episode a week, and then we did two episodes a week, and then we brought on the interview episodes. And we largely had that that format for, I don't, I mean, it took a little while for us, like a, maybe like, two or three years before we added interview episodes as even a thing.

• 2:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Scott Tolinski?

  Right? It still feels brand new to me. And it did feel like we're always kind of like, having to fit the content into the format, right? We had the format, let's figure out how we can fit it into the format. And sometimes that worked out no problem. And I think for the most part, it did. But we heard, especially in the survey that we put out, that maybe there's too much. We're putting out too much, and maybe sometimes a topic could be covered in less time, or we need more time on something. So we decided to give ourselves more freedom and flexibility here, so that on Monday and Wednesday, right? The topics that we find to be interesting, we can spend as much time as we want to on those topics that we find interesting. And that doesn't mean the interview episodes

• 3:36Scott Tolinski?

  that we typically did will be going away. We'll still be doing interviews, but we won't have to do interviews just to do interviews. We will do interviews with the people who have the most interesting and exciting things to tell us. And that way, you know, it doesn't feel like a book tour, or we're just having the same guests on that everybody else is having. We want to really make sure that the, what we're producing comes first and foremost. So, yes. And also, to head off, anybody who might say that centuries behind this, this is purely Westernized decision here. So, you know, we don't even have any century handlers on the, in the podcast team anymore. We are-

• 4:12Wes Bos?

  It's just us.

• 4:12Scott Tolinski?

  It's just us.

• 4:14Wes Bos?

  It's just us going wild, but like- I think also with that is that there's a lot of like some of the feedback we had is we went a little too video heavy a couple of months ago. We've since peeled that back where like if you're listening on audio, you don't want to have to see the video. But there are other topics that make so much more sense to show on a video because you can be showing code samples and whatnot. So it's it's nice to say, and like we were talking about a couple of weeks ago, we're like, when we want to talk about something, we will have the medium for that, whether that's a 15 minute hasty treat,

• 4:50Wes Bos?

  or whether that's a 20 minute YouTube video, or a full, we have to bring somebody on to to talk about it. And I like that freedom of not having to worry about the content type.

• 5:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yeah, that too, and like, you know, wanting wanting to show more video. I think that both the podcast and the video podcast suffered because we weren't able to show as much video as we wanted to. But then when we were showing, like, we had to always be kind of riding that line. But by saying two episodes a week are going to be strictly podcast, although with video, right? The Friday, whatever we do on Friday, is going to be explicitly a video segment, something that we can do that makes way more sense for just video. And that way we won't have to worry about the audio product suffering from using video in that regard. So if you want to get everything that we're doing, it will be on Spotify because Spotify shows video and it will be on YouTube.

• 5:46Scott Tolinski?

  So a lot of the stuff YouTube specifically is going to be the best place to catch everything. But again, your normal podcast player is going to get the Monday and Wednesday.

• 5:57Wes Bos?

  All right. So let's talk about 2024. What happened in in the past year, right? Quite a bit in the web development space. I think probably a big one is React 19 was released. We've been sort of waiting for server components for for many, many years and 2024 was the year React 19 dropped. Server components are now stable. The React compiler came out, which is pretty interesting. I haven't seen like a lot of people using it just yet, but it's kind of, we have it. Turbo pack is is now stable. That's kind of the big things in the React space.

• 6:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, Solid Start was released, which is the, you know, Solid JS meta framework. So if folks out there were using Solid and really wishing there was a more like opinionated, full stack framework for Solid, that was released. Also, Ryan Carneyato joined Sentry. So shout out to Ryan. We got to get him actually on the show to talk about Solidland now that we have, well, we had access to him before, but now that he's part of the Sentry team.

• 7:04Wes Bos?

  We had Tanner on to talk about Tanstack Start. So Tanstack Start is Tanner Lindsay, who's behind React Query and React Location, I believe is his router and behind a whole bunch of the really cool Tanstack packages. Tanstack Query is obviously probably the biggest one. He released a beta just last week of Tanstack Start, which is the like Next JS equivalent. It's client by default, opt into server, which is the opposite of Next JS. And it just seems like a really fresh approach to a framework in that. Also, like, also along

• 7:45Wes Bos?

  the lines is Remix is dead. It's not really dead, but it's, all of the parts of Remix have been moved back into React Router 7. And React Router 7 was released at the end of November. So I believe now, they haven't explicitly said it, but the idea now is you're not building a Remix app, you're building a React Router app. And I believe eventually Remix will go away and not be a thing anymore.

• 8:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it is one of those things. I still don't feel like I understand, like where that's at or what's happening there. But, you know, I think that's a good explanation. I'll be, I'll be looking forward to even more clarity about what's going on. Cause I still, people talk about like Remix, but like.

• 8:33Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's kind of an odd one. Like they didn't, even in the announcement post. They didn't say like remix is dead, but they they did say like you should migrate. Here's how you migrate from remix to React Rider 7. So it's a kind of a bummer because I the name remix is is sick. I like that a lot.

• 8:53Scott Tolinski?

  I know.

• 8:54Wes Bos?

  But it makes sense that like the the router really is the the main part of of your website, right? Your most websites you start from a router and and that's especially when we start doing server client stuff. You really have to buy in at a router level. So it makes sense that that's why they've they've brought it back.

• 9:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, totally. And also, you know, let me just say, back to the Tanstack stuff. Man, yeah, hanging out with Tanner at JS Nation, I know we got to hang out with him on stream and he's such a he's such a dynamic, kind of like exciting person to talk to about this stuff, but just getting to hang out with Tanner at JS Nation. Maybe really like, I really just hope that stuff succeeds even harder because what a cool dude. What a great project. Yeah, I really enjoyed spending time with him and getting to know him a little bit more. AI editors really popped, specifically Cursor was the the big one that people have really been latching on to, you know, personally, myself. I don't use anything other than Cursor anymore, which is, you know, it's short term here. It hasn't been that long.

• 9:57Scott Tolinski?

  But I don't, if VS Code opens by accident, I'm closing it. I'm opening Cursor. I I I just really like the way that the UI works.

• 10:06Wes Bos?

  It feels really good. Yeah.

• 10:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I often see people, especially on Reddit, be like, I don't get why people like Cursor. Is it really just, is it really like just people hyping it up who get paid to say it and stuff like that? I don't get paid to say Cursor is great. I never even, I don't even have any contact with the Cursor team. But I use it and I love it and it for me, it just it it fits that workflow just a little bit better than any other tool currently. I'm actually really excited to see, given that Cursor has shaken things up so much. I'm excited to see like what comes next from that.

• 10:41Wes Bos?

  Totally, because like we did see at GitHub Universe, Copilot released a lot of the features, not all of them. I'm still waiting for a couple, but. And then also Codium released their own fork of VS Code called Windsurf. And it's again, it's gunning for the same area. But Codium has also been in that space of like context, providing context to the model for quite a while. And it's interesting that they have their own editor. So quite a bit popping. You're starting to see these like dudes on Twitter who say they built entire apps with it, which I'm not buying because every time you see one of these guys, they've got a course to sell you and an empty GitHub.

• 11:25Wes Bos?

  So I don't know if I buy that just yet, but it's an exciting time for sure.

• 11:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, an exciting time. And in general, with AI tools overall, it's a scary time, I think, as well. But I think right, right now, we're at the position where you can use these things and feel very productive or take care of a lot of stuff without having some sort of crisis of, am I just a robot writing out code? That a robot could do better or something. There's also, Veet 6 was released very recently, it was released in November, I believe November 26th.

• 11:59Wes Bos?

  And Today, as of recording this, it was released like a couple hours ago.

• 12:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, not just a good memory. I'm actually terrible with dates and times. So the fact that I know that is because it came out today. Veet 6, man, Veet is one of those projects that I'm so happy to see continue to grow, continue to evolve. And now it's part of Void Zero, which is, I believe, the funding platform. We're going to have Evan New on to talk about this, to really get a handle on exactly what Void Zero is. But Veet 6, stoked to see that these changes are still advancing. And one thing I'm really excited about is the eventual addition of Roll Down, which is the next gen version of ES Build and Roll Up. So combining the functionality of those two, having one thing to do all of your builds

• 12:49Scott Tolinski?

  and having it be as fast as ES Build or faster, who knows? I don't even know. But Roll Down, a really cool project. And I'm, it's one of those ones that like, very, very, very excited for it. And hopefully we'll get to try it next year.

• 13:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah, the, the thing with, with Veed is that in development, they use ES Build. And then when they build your app, they use Rollup. And it's always been two different ones. And I guess there's some inconsistencies, although I've, I've never hit any myself, thankfully.

• 13:20Scott Tolinski?

  I'm, I'm sure it's harder on them to maintain both of those, right?

• 13:23Wes Bos?

  Oh, I guarantee, yeah. You have to make two things, do the exact same thing in development and in, in build. That's, that's tricky. So yeah, Evan U has this company called Void Zero, which has raised some money. And I think the idea with the company is they build this amazing open source software and then they'll eventually have some things that you can buy from them. And I bet it's going to be similar to the TurboPak, where you can cache your builds and share them between both build servers as well as, as developers' machines.

• 13:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Uh, I would love all of that stuff. Faster, better, faster, smaller, all that stuff. One cool thing that, that really, you know, came up about at the end of the year was kind of the reemergence of Blue Sky. You know, we did an episode on Blue Sky when it first dropped. We talked a little bit about this AT protocol. And at the time, I just didn't necessarily, it felt like, it felt like blockchain. It felt like Web three. And I didn't necessarily believe that it was anything super interesting. But the more and more that, you know, Blue Sky has evolved here, now the platform is smooth as hell to use. So using Blue Sky is no longer like a worse version of Twitter.

• 14:40Scott Tolinski?

  For the most part, it's a better version of Twitter in many regards, with the exception of maybe like video, right? I think there's some things here or there that, that Twitter still does better, but uh, Blue Sky-

• 14:49Wes Bos?

  There's a lot of features, but it's, it's, it's an exciting change in the web development community.

• 14:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, but, but hey, it works better. I'm gonna, that's what I mean. Like as a, I have so many weird pop in bugs with Twitter.

• 15:04Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Scott Tolinski?

  Tweets popping in here or there, or refresh thing's not happening, or showing me a bunch of dog shit. Yeah, I, I think overall it works better as an app, whether or not the features are there.

• 15:14Wes Bos?

  Good app. It's very impressive. It's also React Native. It's pretty cool. But like all of that aside, and also like political BS aside as well, because like I, I was kind of shocked that, like, I was really excited that the web development community was moving there, just because- I like that there is multiple places for community to be. And then it turned into this weird like political thing in the States. I don't give a single crap about any of that stuff. All I care about is, is there a spot where we can talk to other web developers? That feels really good. And I still love Twitter. I'm still there, but I'm excited that there's like, I grew up on forums and there was many places for people to be.

• 15:59Wes Bos?

  And this is starting to feel like a, a pretty good spot for web developers, which is exciting. Uh, when, when there's more community, cause like, I feel like a lot of developers were kind of burned out on Twitter. Because they, they're not able to share what they're excited about. Because you have to play this algorithm game and that's exhausting. When you just want to say, I made this cool thing and for people to see it.

• 16:25Scott Tolinski?

  And, and when you say you love Twitter, I'm going to say it not, not for any specific reason other than content and, and usability. I, I don't like Twitter. I really don't like it because one, it, it's the algo is so aggressive in what it shows me that I'm often like, I'm not seeing anything I want to see. I'm seeing a lot of rage bait. I'm seeing a lot of people fighting and I, I try to dismiss or hide or mute any of that stuff. And only follow engage with people I actually want to hear from. But at the end of the day, I'm still not seeing the content from people who I, I follow as much as I am on, on Blue Sky, which is why it feels better. I'm not playing the algo games.

• 17:06Scott Tolinski?

  I'm not, uh, I'm not working really hard on something, sending it out and having two people see it because the algo didn't pick it up. Right? So, oh yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of weird little things about it. But either way, I think the protocol behind this is something that is the most interesting thing where it's kind of like, I can't wait to talk to Dan, we're going to have Dan Abramov on the show and really dive into this. But it does feel very RSS adjacent in terms of. The feed exists and Blue Sky is just an interface for the feed, whether that is in the Blue Sky app or you're working with the feed in other ways. And I think that's the most exciting part about it in general.

• 17:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I think it's really neat that you can like you can literally fork the entire Blue Sky app and and connect it up and you can you can build your own client. You can host your own version of something, which I think us web developers really like the fact that you can host your own data.

• 18:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Wes Bos?

  Will any of us do it? I highly doubt it. Half the people on Blue Sky haven't even assigned a domain name to their handle yet. They're just using the built in one, but.

• 18:17Scott Tolinski?

  Most people didn't edit their MySpace profiles either, but a handful of people did, and it got them really interested in learning HTML and CSS. So I think that's like, kind of, you know, back in the earlier days of Twitter, when the API was still open.

• 18:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Scott Tolinski?

  You didn't have to bankrupt you to use it. The people were doing some of the coolest stuff with the Twitter API.

• 18:40Wes Bos?

  Tools come out of it.

• 18:41Scott Tolinski?

  And and that's the stuff that I miss. I miss the most. Yeah.

• 18:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah, there's so many cool little projects like I just I even just built a little count on my Stream Deck that will show.

• 18:53Scott Tolinski?

  Nice.

• 18:54Wes Bos?

  Like when a new follower comes in and yeah, it's just being able to hack on that kind of stuff. It's really exciting and it's funny because a year and a half ago I did a whole bunch of examples. And now when Blue Sky popped again, all of those examples were getting getting popular and people are sending pull requests in and a lot of people ran the code without seeing what it did. So they I had a couple of bots in there that would auto reply. And so every now and then I get people reply to me with their bots that they obviously were just randomly running code from a stranger on the internet.

• 19:32Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, back to web stuff.

• 19:33Wes Bos?

  Exciting stuff. Yeah, that is web stuff, though. Like, that's that's our community, man. And it's it's really cool. And again, I'm kind of bummed that it's been hijacked as a political thing, which is not. I honestly don't think that that's that's where that discussion needs to be. It's just all about like, where we hang out.

• 19:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, totally.

• 19:53Wes Bos?

  But CSS, CSS, so many crazy things came to CSS or are coming in in the next year. CSS has landed late 2023. So we started to like 2024 was like probably the year we see people using CSS has relative color is starting to be well supported pop over. And then all the stuff around just like starting style, allowed discrete calc size, where I think it's like a lot of like JavaScript replacements, right? Like you did you did a talk on all this stuff?

• 20:27Scott Tolinski?

  I did a talk on all this stuff. And man, it's not even just that. It's not even like the stuff that we can use today. It's the stuff that came onto the radar that is now like going to be here soon. Right? Yeah. The starting style animating when things enter and leave the DOM, the the parent selector. I know that came at the very end of last year, but it also, I think, came to all the browsers more recently. And invokers, which is a newer API, we've talked about a couple of times, but that's replacing JavaScript to invoke things like opening a modal or starting and stopping an audio player, invokers being done with just purely HTML. So like, yes, we're not only getting better JavaScript tools, which, you know, we're JavaScript

• 21:12Scott Tolinski?

  dudes. We love JavaScript tools. What's that? We're Costco guys. We're JavaScript guys.

• 21:17Wes Bos?

  That's a wild world, the Costco guys, yeah.

• 21:20Scott Tolinski?

  It is a wild, it's a wild world.

• 21:22Wes Bos?

  We could do a whole podcast talking about the Costco guys. I got some thoughts.

• 21:26Scott Tolinski?

  I know, I know, I know. I do too. Did you watch them on the late night show? I believe they're on like

• 21:31Wes Bos?

  No, I saw some clips, though.

• 21:33Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, you should watch it.

• 21:34Wes Bos?

  I was a little worried for the humanity that that's what is the most popular thing. But also, like, go get it. Like, that kid is probably getting loaded right now.

• 21:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, that and the Haka girl, you're like, alright, it's it's not for me, uh, but you know, I can't really hate on it too much. You're you're, you know, you're making your 15 minutes worth it. So, so yeah, all this cool stuff, man. It is just replacing JavaScript and the more that we can replace JavaScript, the better, more accessible by default and just smaller applications will be able to ship with the tools we know and love. And therefore we won't have to reach for uh, building native apps. We can use the the web, which hey, we love the web.

• 22:14Wes Bos?

  Exactly. Big fan of all of that. Um, what did we do? We'd hit up tons of events this year, right? We were at React Miami. We did a syntax live there up in March. You were at JS Nation in Amsterdam. When was that? June, July?

• 22:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, sometime around then. It was uh, yeah, I think it was June or July. I'd have to look at my calendar. I'm bad with dates. Uh, but it was in the the first little bit of the year, at least the first half of the year. And man, JS Nation Amsterdam, one of the coolest conferences I've ever been to. There was like 1600 plus people. I I did not realize, I'm so good about saying yes to things and then seeing the size of the stage and then being like, oh, what? Uh, like I walked into JS Nation Amsterdam and I swear the seats just kept going and going and going. It looked like infinity to a point. Yeah.

• 22:58Wes Bos?

  They have a screen halfway down.

• 23:01Scott Tolinski?

  A massive screen too.

• 23:02Wes Bos?

  Half, yeah, like the the screen itself is is probably like 40 feet tall. Most beautiful LED pixel panels. You can like, the blacks are just black. And then they have like a second projector screen like halfway down because it's so far back. And uh, I don't, I don't know that there's conferences that big in the States, aside from maybe GitHub Universe. But like, I don't know that there's a web development conference that huge in in North America.

• 23:31Scott Tolinski?

  It was so cool and it was such a cool experience for me. But overall, conference was really great. A lot of amazing speakers. Um, you got to hang with a lot of cool people and it was a three day thing where they had a React Summit Amsterdam and they also had a, I believe like a CSS and web conference that like Yuna was speaking and a bunch of really cool people. So it was just like the coolest people popping in and out and amazing audience. Got to meet a lot of great people. We also did more recently JS Nation US and React Summit US where I was emceeing React Summit, which, uh, man, emceeing was a lot of fun. I was, I was, I'll be, I'll be honest. I was nervous to emcee. I'd never done emceeing in any regard before and is kind of like just doing this podcast.

• 24:15Scott Tolinski?

  You just show up and you get to either read from your notes or talk or whatever. I get to interview, uh, Ken C. Daz, Eddie Asmani, um, uh, Shruti Kapoor and, uh, Theo Brown. Like I got to just be on stage and talk to those folks and man, what a cool experience. You got to talk at in a planetarium.

• 24:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah. The, again, speaking of wild screens, like it was a, it was in a planetarium and they projected our, uh, our slides like on this like curved thing. I had to zoom my slides out just so that it wasn't, like I, I was watching and I felt that the slides were too big. Uh, like you had to crane your neck up and down just to read it. So I zoomed my slides out so you can see them without moving your neck. And it was, it is a really cool conference.

• 24:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I had a great time. And then we also did, um, while we were there in New York, we did Terminal Feud, which was Family Feud. And by the time you're listening to this, it will be available on YouTube to watch, I believe. And man-

• 25:11Wes Bos?

  I think it's going on Prime's YouTube channel, the Primogen. So check that out. That was hilarious.

• 25:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Let me tell you, I am much worse at coming up with stuff on the fly than you would think I would be. Which, you know what? There, there was, when we were doing that speed round, we were doing a speed round where Wes and I were supposed to be guessing different things that fit a prompt. And we ended up just guessing the same things. But since Wes went first, all of his answers were accepted. But so when they asked me a question, the first thing that pops into my head immediately is like eh, because Wes had already gotten it. So then my brain goes, oh no, oh no, I gotta think of something else.

• 25:49Wes Bos?

  They're like NPM install blank, like fill in the blank, NPM install anything. And you're just like, I can't think of anything to NPM install.

• 25:57Scott Tolinski?

  I couldn't think of a single thing. It was like my brain had been wiped completely clear. Like the only thing I could think of was node. I was like, NPM install node. That's what my brain went to. And I was like, I can't say node. That's not, that's not like, that's going to, everybody's going to like completely- Well, I got two points from it because one, the couple of pity people had put in P N P M. I should not have said P N P M. I was thinking about it afterwards. I should have just said svelte because you know, that's, that's, I was up there wearing a svelte T-shirt. And you know, it's kind of my identity, but yeah.

• 26:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that was fun. We also did, uh, Laravel Terminal did a basketball game. Scott and I, uh, what do you, we call, we didn't call it, we.

• 26:36Scott Tolinski?

  We were doing color commentary.

• 26:38Wes Bos?

  Color commentary.

• 26:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, typically in, in commentary, you have a play by play guy or play by play person and a color person. And you know what, man? Neither of us know basketball, so neither of us could do play by play. So we were both doing color commentary and it was super fun. I, I came with a whole bunch of jokes and used all of them in the first five minutes and then had to come up with more on the fly, but that was cool. That was a fun experience.

• 27:02Wes Bos?

  We had a meetup in San Francisco and that was really fun. We had a couple hundred people come out. I think, I think it was like between two fifty ish or around two hundred and fifty people, quite a lot. We had a whole bunch of stickers and swag that we gave away. That was really fun. We had a whole team there. Met a bunch of really cool people. Um, we had GitHub Universe. We did a couple podcasts live from the GitHub Universe floor, which again, that was a very large conference. I can't believe it's five thousand people or something.

• 27:35Scott Tolinski?

  Definitely mind blowing. Uh, yeah, we don't get to go to that many events like that.

• 27:39Wes Bos?

  No, and like I usually go to more like web development, homegrown comps. And like this was like corporate, not that it was bad, but like the big companies were there announcing very big things and partnerships and whatnot. Yeah, we were there for the, all the VS Code co-pilot stuff, which is really exciting.

• 28:01Scott Tolinski?

  And we got to talk to Cassidy in our podcast booth, which was a lot of fun.

• 28:05Wes Bos?

  That was awesome. Yeah.

• 28:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, really cool.

• 28:07Wes Bos?

  I spoke at FITC, which is a Toronto conference. I highly recommend you go if you are like to visit Canada at some point, or you're from Canada. FITC is, it used to be a flash conference like fifteen years ago, but now it's a pretty heavy web development. I talked about all the different JavaScript runtime, so. Bundino node and kinda went hard on the like, you don't have to worry too much about these different runtimes. It's because we have standards that will work everywhere.

• 28:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, totally. And we also did a whole bunch of podcast episodes. Not only that, ton of video. I mean, syntax overall, man, we had a crazy year in terms of like, growth for us, where it is hard to imagine that at the beginning of the year, we were not on YouTube and we were not releasing these podcasts as videos. Now, we've been doing it, it feels like since the jump. It's been going so long and we hired CJ Reynolds to do video for us on YouTube. So, man, syntax as a platform has really grown significantly. And especially with the push to YouTube, it feels full circle to me. And I know you've been doing YouTube a long time,

• 29:16Scott Tolinski?

  but I really got my career start on YouTube in 2012. So for me, I put so much time into YouTube, it feels great to be doing a lot of video and a lot of YouTube. It just feels, it feels like I'm, I'm back. I'm back.

• 29:29Wes Bos?

  You're back. Yeah, the OG.

• 29:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yep.

• 29:32Wes Bos?

  All right, let's get into our predictions. So every year, we predict what will happen in the next year. And then we followed up at the end of the year. And we're gonna go through and see how right or wrong we were. So the first one was, types in JS will have real movement. Haven't really heard a whole lot of that. That's the proposal is still sort of going through the, the process, but I thought we would be a little further ahead on this type of thing. Not that I'm mad about that, because if they are trying to figure out adding types to JavaScript, or at least adding the syntax of types to JavaScript, because that's what the proposal currently is.

• 30:14Wes Bos?

  It's not adding types to JavaScript engine. It's just adding it to the syntax so that they can be parsed out, right? So you can use TypeScript or something similar with the, with the syntax. So it's not like the browser will understand the types.

• 30:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Well, I do want to give us some credit on this one. Node came with type support, as far as being able to run code with TypeScript in it.

• 30:39Wes Bos?

  Yes. That, well, that, that's one that's a little later on this list was. Uh, Node will introduce TypeScript support via loaders.

• 30:47Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 30:48Wes Bos?

  And we didn't nail that as it's not necessarily a loader yet, but that is the idea. And Node did ship TypeScript support. So now you can run Node with .ts files and it will simply strip them out and, and run with you, which is super exciting.

• 31:06Scott Tolinski?

  To me, that's types in JS having a real moment. That's a moment.

• 31:09Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you're right. That's true. Like that's, that's Node recognizing.

• 31:13Scott Tolinski?

  This is the way.

• 31:15Wes Bos?

  This is the way. This is, people want this and I probably Dino and Bun have a lot to do with that.

• 31:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Wes Bos?

  Pushing sort of Node into features that we want rather than having to cobble it all together.

• 31:28Scott Tolinski?

  Totally. Next one, the temporal API will ship in one browser. That one's a big fat X. We, uh, we did not do, uh, we did not get that, which is a bummer. Yeah.

• 31:39Wes Bos?

  Safari has like two of the features behind a flag.

• 31:44Scott Tolinski?

  Do they really?

• 31:45Wes Bos?

  Uh, and that's it. It, but like not the whole, not the whole API, just a couple of little parts that have been behind a flag in, I think in technical preview.

• 31:57Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, it looks like the technical preview has instant and duration. And it was Safari. Looks like it's going to be the first to ship temporal. So hell yeah, Safari, cool.

• 32:10Wes Bos?

  It's such a huge, huge spec. I think it's, it's a bit daunting to have to implement it because there's so many pieces to it, but man, once this thing lands, being able to use it, I guess we could use it via polyfill now, but.

• 32:24Scott Tolinski?

  I am.

• 32:24Wes Bos?

  I'm, I'm ready to like rewire my brain to think in terms of temporal.

• 32:29Scott Tolinski?

  I already did that.

• 32:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Scott Tolinski?

  I, I've been using the polyfill for a little bit, which may be dumb or not, but uh, yeah, I do, I do like it and you will like it too, folks. Uh, if you're out there and you're wondering, am I, am I going to get that much out of the temporal API? Yes, it eliminates the need for me to use a library at all for doing dates and times. And it just makes working with them way easier. Perf tooling gets easy for, easier for everyone to understand. I know we got a handful of perf tools in Sentry, but I don't know if you could definitively say that perf tooling has gotten easier for everyone to understand. You know, the browser kind of hasn't changed in that regard. We still have all of the same tools, which are good, but yeah.

• 33:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know that we nailed that one. I think if anything, like we got compiler in React. So that's, that's a big win for perf, right?

• 33:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 33:21Wes Bos?

  And then we did get speculation rules as well, or maybe that's coming. But I don't know that the, the tooling around that got any better. But one we did nail CSS continues to get better where you need less JS. Absolutely nailed that. We just talked about all those CSS features where you don't need JS for them. Not that you shouldn't, not that you should hate JS. It's just like, if you don't need to run a bunch of JavaScript and DOM traversal, adding classes, wrapping things, duplicating elements, it's, it's really nice to not have to.

• 33:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, it is. And I think overall, I don't, I don't know if it's just vibes based, but it does feel like we're getting more and more DOM focused overall, whether that is via frameworks or HTML APIs and things like that. Getting more DOM focused, getting more HTML focused.

• 34:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah, web, web components. We didn't have anything in here about web components, but

• 34:19Scott Tolinski?

  That's surprising.

• 34:20Wes Bos?

  There was opinions on web components this year.

• 34:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Wes Bos?

  I like them.

• 34:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, we mentioned Svelte 5. Svelte 5 was released and is very fast. We just recorded an episode, it was released on Wednesday about that. And yeah, the code's much smaller, very, very fast, and that's exciting for everybody.

• 34:38Wes Bos?

  The year of server in frameworks, I think we, we nailed this one is pretty much every framework has either the ability to do server or you see a lot of stuff being server first, server by default, right? So next JS, oh my gosh, I just clicked on, I just clicked on one of the timestamps in the show notes. And it says, Wes Boss, our old like intro, it just scared the crap out of me.

• 35:07Scott Tolinski?

  Whiz Boss.

• 35:08Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's great.

• 35:10Scott Tolinski?

  And it's funny, just, you know, classically having to be contrarian. I have now moved further and further into the client side now that we have all the server side stuff. So that's just how it goes, right? I think it'll be interesting to see what our predictions are for next year because I do have some predictions for next year. We had Astros going to have a good year. You know, Astros had a good year, but I don't think anything explicitly like.

• 35:36Wes Bos?

  Oh, I think so. I think, let's look at the NPM stats for Astro. I think Astro popped, man. Yeah, so Astro pretty much doubled their download numbers in the last calendar year, which is pretty impressive to me. So I would say that's a, that's a pretty good. It still is, if I were to compare it against Svelte, Svelte is still five, six times larger.

• 36:05Scott Tolinski?

  Had a good year.

• 36:06Wes Bos?

  Downloads, but Svelte had a really good year. Astro had a really good year. So yeah, I think they did great. Our next one we had here is React server components will become popular. I think maybe we got this wrong. Not that server components are bad. I'm very much an enjoyer of server components, but I did not see the uptake. It seems like, like last year this time, we were kind of just waiting around, seeing what people think. And I think we're still in a wait around and see what people think area. Obviously, a lot of people are using them, but I don't, I thought the uptake would be a lot more. And even like, like they're not in React Router Remix or Tanstack Start.

• 36:52Wes Bos?

  So really, if you want to use server components right now, you gotta, you're still using NextJS or one of these like new frameworks that are kind of around them.

• 37:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, we also had Remix moves away from page-based loaders to component loaders.

• 37:08Wes Bos?

  Well, they moved away.

• 37:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they moved away to, as we already mentioned, to being React Router. But again, I don't even, yeah, that's not on my radar at all at this point. We also had Hono will become more ubiquitous. And yeah, I think Hono has been more used. You know, CJ did a video on Hono that got a lot of views. So I would imagine that that means that people are interested in picking up a modern Express alternative. And Hono seems to be the chosen.

• 37:37Wes Bos?

  Yeah, so Hono went from 36,000 downloads a day at the end of last year to 444,000 downloads. So like exploded. And along with Hono, we're also seeing all of the un-JS ecosystem

• 37:57Wes Bos?

  get really popular. It's kind of in the same area of Hono, which is basically standards-based server JavaScript. And like you see, like a Hono equivalent, their Hono equivalent is called Nitro. But then we also saw Vinci, which is what Tanzact Start and Sol Start are built on top of. So some really exciting times for like server standard JavaScript or just standard JavaScript in general, because it doesn't matter a lot of times if it's on the server.

• 38:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Next one, URL pattern standard. We will see a route matching proposal move ahead. And then link to the URL pattern standard. I have not kept up with this at all.

• 38:40Wes Bos?

  I have not kept. So this, the idea here is that the writing patterns for routing, like you were to do in Hono or Express or anything like that, that standard is going to become a standard API called the URL pattern API, very similar to how we have the URL and URL search params in JavaScript. And it is.

• 39:07Scott Tolinski?

  Hmm.

• 39:08Wes Bos?

  Currently still being worked on. It's last updated just a couple of months ago, so.

• 39:11Scott Tolinski?

  It seems like it's in.

• 39:12Wes Bos?

  Very fleshed out.

• 39:14Scott Tolinski?

  It's in Chrome. It's been in Chrome since 2021, but no movement in Safari or Firefox maybe.

• 39:20Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 39:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. All right.

• 39:22Wes Bos?

  Bun releases full node compat. We did not see this. They obviously continue to work on their node compat, but there still is, is quite a bit. In fact, they're part of the unJS ecosystem is this package called unenv, U N E N V, and it actually brought Cloudflare workers and Bun and Dino all up to to full node JS compat. It's essentially just a transpiler plus polyfill for server JavaScript, which is, which is pretty exciting. So we're at a spot now where if you have a node API, you can pretty much run it in most of these, these runtimes, either via like Dino 2 has full node compat.

• 40:07Wes Bos?

  Um, I tested it myself. I I converted my whole class course platform to run on Dino and it it worked. Or via unenv, which will sort of polyfill the parts that are are not quite there yet. Bun is Bun is focused, I think, more on like killer features rather than node compat, which people seem to be liking. Um, they'll release something that is non-standard. And as much as the standards guy in me wants to say, no, do the standard. Some of those APIs are pretty sweet and I would like to also use them.

• 40:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, we will also see a new linter formater entirely replace. Um, and the ones we had listed were, you know, OXC, prettier, biome. I I don't think any of that happened. I mean, there are things that people are using. People are using. It is biome. I was thinking it was called Rome now, but that's the other way around. Rome became biome. People are using biome. I'm, I, it doesn't support all of the things that prettier supports. And until something supports everything that prettier supports, I'm not using it. So yeah, I, I don't actually understand the people who can use one of these and not have it. Let's see what it doesn't support right now.

• 41:20Wes Bos?

  Like work with everything.

• 41:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I believe it doesn't support like HTML or CSS or something.

• 41:25Wes Bos?

  Yeah. The killer feature is once they can parse HTML, then they'll be able to format lint, pretty much anything, right? Like you can view, spell, um, whatever. It does support JSX, JavaScript, TypeScript and CSS. So for a lot of people,

• 41:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Wes Bos?

  Their whole stack is covered already. And that was not the case a year ago. I'm still pretty bullish on, on biome taking, taking over, but I, I guess we'll see.

• 41:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I gotta have that HTML support, even markdown support. I want to have markdown support, YAML support. I needed to support all of the things I use because if I run into a situation, I hit save and my stuff doesn't, I don't even need linting for all of that. Just formatting. Give me formatting for everything I use and I'm, I'm okay with that.

• 42:17Wes Bos?

  We said a new TypeScript type checker?

• 42:19Scott Tolinski?

  Did we really say that that was gonna happen?

• 42:21Wes Bos?

  I, man, sweet summer child, if I had thought that that would come. No, that's, that might never come. And I think here, here's my thoughts on this. We're never going to have a new TypeScript type checker, but we will have a, something that comes after TypeScript eventually. And someone's going to come out with, um, like probably the one project that you should watch in the space is called Esno. They are basically taking the like TypeScript syntax, but building their own type checker on top of that, or not on top of it, but they're building their own TypeScript type checker. And I bet once that matures, we'll see people being like, all right, like TypeScript,

• 43:04Wes Bos?

  the good parts, you know? No e-nums and, and whatnot. The, the errors are a little bit better, but I don't even know that prob, we're probably many years away from, from that being a reality.

• 43:15Scott Tolinski?

  Which feels, it feels wild, but at the same time, I get it, you know?

• 43:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 43:19Scott Tolinski?

  If it was easy, it would have happened. Yeah.

• 43:21Wes Bos?

  Yeah. It's, it's fine.

• 43:24Wes Bos?

  And like, I love type check. I mean, the like, the type checker itself, it's almost always fine for my projects, you know, it could be a little bit faster and whatnot, but it's, it's not a, now that we have like just strippers, it doesn't get in the way of your actual development.

• 43:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Now that we got strippers, uh, Lightning CSS pops, uh, Lightning CSS. Yeah. I, uh, I didn't use Lightning CSS anymore, uh, or less. It pretty much was in the same spot for me as it was when I recorded this episode.

• 43:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Scott Tolinski?

  And that, that's not a bad spot. It's just, I haven't been using post CSS if we're being entirely honest. I've just been, uh, going straight up CSS mostly.

• 44:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's like, maybe the, the new CSS killer framework is just regular CSS. Tailwind four is, is using Lightning CSS by default now. So that's probably a major one for using Lightning CSS. There was something else using Lightning CSS. So Lightning CSS is kind of like a post CSS alternative. And it will parse and transpile your CSS back to stuff that works in, in all the browsers. It's kind of like the, the Babbel story, you know, like at, at one point, we don't need to transpile our CSS, but other times you,

• 44:42Wes Bos?

  you still need tools that can parse and analyze all of your, your CSS, whether that's to do things like prefix or transpile, or just to get stats on, on what's going on. So the Lightning CSS has gone from a half a million to 1.6 million. So it's, it more than tripled in its usage. So I would say that's a pretty good pointer to this becoming more popular.

• 45:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

• 45:10Wes Bos?

  One of them here is, uh, you'll hear more about RS pack and turbo pack. I think we nailed that one. Uh, turbo pack is now stable. RS pack. I just saw a really good talk from the creator Zach at the conference a couple of weeks ago and really interesting look at. Moving Webpack over to Rust. And then he was also at the end of his talk, he was talking about how like, even if you don't like Webpack, maybe the internals of RS pack could be surfaced in a different way. Right? Like, the reason we like VEET is because it's so easy to use. We don't have to write Webpack effects. So maybe in the next year, we'll start seeing more tooling

• 45:50Wes Bos?

  around that. VEET is not going to release anything big in 2024. They just released VEET 6, which they said was their biggest release ever. I think that's more from like a code point of view, because from a user, nothing really changed. But they have teased or have released their new environments API, which is going to make doing server stuff and different JavaScript runtime stuff a little bit easier.

• 46:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so there was a release, and they say it's a major release. So we can say we failed on that one. Relative color will land in all browsers.

• 46:28Wes Bos?

  Color mix was canned so that we can just use the relative color syntax, which is simply using HSL, RGB, whatever, when you want, and the from keyword.

• 46:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yeah, relative color. It actually, man.

• 46:42Wes Bos?

  It's in.

• 46:43Scott Tolinski?

  It's in-ish, yeah.

• 46:45Wes Bos?

  It's in every browser. It hit Firefox in 133, which is just a couple of weeks ago.

• 46:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 46:52Wes Bos?

  And yeah, it's in, it's in every browser.

• 46:55Scott Tolinski?

  Listen, it's not an opera completely.

• 46:58Wes Bos?

  Opera.

• 47:00Scott Tolinski?

  140. I know, I know. It doesn't support current color.

• 47:04Wes Bos?

  Kills me about these can I use is every time I post about anything, somebody goes, what about Opera Mobile? And like, that's coming from a person who's never, doesn't understand what Opera Mobile, or sorry, Opera Mini actually is. There are use cases for that, but the chances are if somebody's using Opera Mini on your website, you don't need to worry about relative color syntax.

• 47:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no, it's available to 88.8% of users, which in my mind is a good amount of users.

• 47:35Wes Bos?

  It is in, it is in Opera. However, you cannot use current color.

• 47:39Scott Tolinski?

  Right, you can't use current.

• 47:39Wes Bos?

  As the color. Big fan of of relative color. At the very least, just to make a color somewhat transparent, being able to add an alpha value to a color without like the hex value. You know, you can add the two, the seven and eighth hex digits on the end of a hex code to make a color transparent. I can, I can never remember what the common hex values are for 50% transparency.

• 48:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I agree. I I'm stoked. This is one of my, one of the most exciting APIs for me as a CSS guy.

• 48:14Wes Bos?

  We said the color contrast is going to land in Chrome. That was wrong. It's in no browsers right now. It's in Safari behind a flag. But there is, they sort of like rolled it back and they're still trying to figure out what is a good algorithm for color contrast because color contrast is a hard thing to to get right. And and you can only math it so much. So they're trying to figure out what that looks like. So that still, I'm dying for that to be added, but they're still trying to figure that out.

• 48:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. All right. Next one is scroll animations landing in two browsers. That didn't happen. Let me tell you, CSS stuff happens so quickly these days that I I've like talked about scroll animations. I've used them so much and then I don't even know if they landed in two browsers at this point.

• 49:04Wes Bos?

  They're in Chrome, they're in Edge.

• 49:06Scott Tolinski?

  That doesn't count.

• 49:08Wes Bos?

  They are in Opera.

• 49:10Scott Tolinski?

  That doesn't count.

• 49:13Wes Bos?

  They're probably in Brave. They're gonna be in.

• 49:17Scott Tolinski?

  An Arc.

• 49:19Wes Bos?

  Yes, in Arc. No. So they are behind a flag in Firefox and then they are in Chrome. But no sign of them hitting Safari just yet, which is Safari's been first on a lot of this stuff in CSS. But doesn't seem like this one. You can polyfill the JavaScript API though. So that that is something, meaning that you can get them to work, but you cannot polyfill the CSS API. There was, but it broke. And it doesn't, it doesn't work anymore. I don't know what happened, but I looked into it myself for my own website and I opted just to turn that off for the browsers that don't support it.

• 50:01Scott Tolinski?

  Word. All right. What about the year of CSS discovery? I, I don't remember what this is, but I'd have to imagine it means that like people are going to discover all these cool features about CSS. And I would like to say that that did happen because hey, I gave talks about it. You gave talks about it. We talked about it on this podcast, but more or less I see people talking about the new CSS features all the time now. And I see people shipping them and using them. So.

• 50:27Wes Bos?

  I'm at a point now where I all like show one CSS feature in a video and almost every video is, oh, what, what are you using to get that nesting? Is that sass? Like, no, we've had nesting for a long time now and a lot of people don't know about it. I, I think part of that is because so many people are just on tailwind and they don't know about it or need it.

• 50:51Wes Bos?

  But there's, there's so many cool things landing in CSS and I think people are starting to, starting to figure that out.

• 50:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And I'm excited. I'm excited for next year's year of discovery of CSS because that's how, that's how the stuff's going at this point. It is moving in the best way possible.

• 51:09Wes Bos?

  Safari will ship three missing progressive web app support.

• 51:13Scott Tolinski?

  They shipped something.

• 51:13Wes Bos?

  In fact, well, they, they literally clawed back PWA support in European browsers. And then everybody raise a stank about it. And so they, what did they, they shipped add to, add to doc was, was one. We had Jen Simmons on this year talking about all the new stuff. So the thing about Safari is they're not releasing them as like manifest progressive web app, but they're adding the features.

• 51:43Wes Bos?

  Into the browser without them being like proper, I guess, like you can now add to home screen and add to your dock. You can color specific things. You can take the title bar out. So I guess there, there probably was, I don't know, three. It's, it's hard to say. I should have, should have looked it up, but still Safari is a drag in there. It heals on a few of these progressive web app things.

• 52:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I wonder why. Yeah. We had Firefox usage will continue to slip. You know what? People talk about using Firefox all the time, but I, I just don't see Firefox really coming back to be

• 52:23Wes Bos?

  No.

• 52:24Scott Tolinski?

  major, major numbers.

• 52:25Wes Bos?

  Bit of a bummer. I don't, I don't think it's, if anything, like I would hope that here, here's a sneak peek of my, my guess for next year is that OpenAI is going to release a browser. I unfortunately, it's probably going to be a Chrome Chromium fork, but wouldn't it be cool if OpenAI put their billions of dollars behind Firefox and like, started paying people to, to work on it? That'd be pretty neat.

• 52:53Scott Tolinski?

  You know what? There has been a world of Firefox forks recently. Um, you know, it, since Arc announced that like their Arc browser is done and it basically, you know, the browser, the browser company pivoting from shipping a browser to shipping AI, uh, which is ridiculous, but Zen browser is one that people often recommend. I don't know if you've seen zen-browser.app. Um, Zen browser is one that people often recommend, and I gotta say, I don't buy it. I just straight up don't buy it because it, it is like a very light skin on top of Firefox. And it's like, oh, we made it look like Arc.

• 53:32Scott Tolinski?

  But what they didn't do is copy any of the features of Arc, whether that is like the, uh, the, the launcher or any of like, you know, if you command T to open a tab and that tab is already open, it doesn't, it opens a new one, right? I use Zen and I was like, this is Firefox with a couple of extensions added on. To it. So anybody out there has been like Zen is the the perfect replacement for for Arc. It's like, not quite, but I do think it's interesting that somebody made a fork of Firefox that is seemingly getting some attention. And yeah, hopefully, hopefully they add more Arc features to actually make it like Arc beyond a coat of paint. But

• 54:14Wes Bos?

  I dropped Firefox in in this year.

• 54:17Scott Tolinski?

  You did.

• 54:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I've been on Edge, didn't you? For maybe six months now and and like, man, installing Edge is awful. Like, there's like AI games added everywhere, all this BS, you know, Microsoft Clippy, pretty sure you have to like login via Excel spreadsheet. But once you turn all that Microsoft BS off, the dev tools are the best. They they have people working on that. It's not just Chrome's dev tools, like it is, but they have added some selector performance stuff to it. They added the ability to dock the tabs to the left. There's like five or six different things in the dev tools, along with just the overall look and feel of them that that make it really good.

• 55:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, nice. Yes. I I just can't. I'm sorry. There's there's enough Microsofty things about the UI that it just drives me nuts. I'm still on Arc. Yeah, I'm writing Arc, Arc to it, can't be.

• 55:17Wes Bos?

  Until they stop updating it. Yeah, the the sad thing about that is

• 55:23Wes Bos?

  the Arc failing probably means that no one is ever going to make a browser that is like for developers anymore, you know, it unfortunately has to be a bunch of AI garbage or like coupon clipping or like stuff built in that will just regular normie web users are going to want. Which I think is why OpenAI is probably gonna be one of the big players in this space.

• 55:51Scott Tolinski?

  And it makes sense if you think about it, because I mean, we can talk about this in our predictions, but like,

• 55:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Scott Tolinski?

  We, we, we've seen the AI kind of take over of the search engine, whether that's perplexity, or just the, the simple like assistant type of searches that you do typically like, what was it? Last night I was playing Kid Sequence with my daughter and I didn't know if diagonals counted or not. What did I do? I didn't go to Google. I went to ChatGPT Kid Sequence. Can diagonals count? Yes, diagonals count in Kid Sequence. Done. All right. I win. In your face, daughter. Uh, let me tell you, my five-year-old is so good at puzzles and, um, spatial things. And she clearly got my spatial skills and she destroyed Courtney in Kid Sequence a couple of times. And she comes in, she's like, I'm gonna beat you. And I was like, oh, you don't even know. I got the same brain as you.

• 56:38Scott Tolinski?

  And I'm like, I'm, I can take a five-year-old in, in sequence and we played to a draw. It's like an actual stalemate. I'm just like, yeah, this is, feels like playing myself here. I love it.

• 56:52Wes Bos?

  That's good.

• 56:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Wes Bos?

  We also had paid ARC features. Uh, yeah, that was wrong. So if you didn't hear, ARC decided they're shutting down.

• 57:03Wes Bos?

  Well, kind of. They're making an entire new browser, which is like all AI focused. So the ARC itself is, is not going to be a thing for, for much longer. Uh, but then we had more XR web experiences, um, as Apple releases InVision Pro.

• 57:22Wes Bos?

  Uh, you're the one with the, the goggles. Did that happen?

• 57:26Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, you know what? The goggles now, they do have XR, WebXR support. So that did ship.

• 57:32Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 57:33Scott Tolinski?

  Whether or not people are shipping XR, I, I, I've seen some cool things in some cool demos, but nothing practical. The only thing I, I really find to be a practical upgrade in the VR space is now that the Vision Pro has an ultra-wide monitor that I can use in my car or outside or whatever. But as far as web stuff goes, I didn't necessarily see anything major there. I do think that will be coming, uh, especially we. Did see some like very glasses based IR headsets that looked a little ridiculous, but they're coming. And once you have glasses that can do what the Vision Pro can do, then the WebXR is going to be all over the place, right? Your experiences are going to be placing things in 3D space around you rather than, you know, opening up a window to browse through a website.

• 58:19Wes Bos?

  Isn't it funny how like technology can be so life changing, but will not pick up because they're looks dumb?

• 58:27Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:27Wes Bos?

  Like the Segway was like that, too. Like electric bicycles, electric scooters have have literally changed people's lives because they now can have transportation. It's changed like food delivery, like they've had a major impact on the world. But like Segway didn't get any of that because you look like a nerd riding it.

• 58:48Scott Tolinski?

  It didn't help that they like made you wear helmets and everybody was like in a cluster of Segways. Like, there's a lot of things. But you know, those like hoverboards. I do feel like that's probably some of the same tech, right?

• 58:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 59:00Scott Tolinski?

  All it took was to make it into an unsafe little toy device for people.

• 59:04Wes Bos?

  My daughter has one. I am. Yeah, they're they're they're like crazy. They're pretty fun, though. I took one apart because I bought I bought a broken one because just so we can have a second one. And I was just like going through how it all works. And it's amazing that they're able to take the Segway tech and put it onto a board that you can buy on AliExpress for $37.

• 59:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I I do love the the one wheel stuff. I don't have a one wheel, but I think it's so cool. I know I'm going to hurt myself very badly. Everybody hurts themselves on them. And I hurt myself doing anything. I fractured my tailbone in the cleaning the bathtub. So I will. I I will hurt myself on a one wheel. That will happen, but I want one anyways. Yeah.

• 59:55Wes Bos?

  AI real quick, a couple AI ones. He said AI tooling is gonna pop off. I think that we nailed that one. So V zero by Versal got really big. We saw Bolt new from the Stackblitz, which is has exploded. GitHub released their own version of it. What? I totally forget what it was called.

• 1:00:15Scott Tolinski?

  Cursor.

• 1:00:16Wes Bos?

  No, not cursor. What was GitHub's? GitHub Spark is their version of it. So yeah, we saw a lot of AI tooling. Obviously cursor. We hadn't. We didn't say the word cursor this time last year and it's it's all you hear right now.

• 1:00:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, it didn't. Yeah, it didn't exist, right? I mean, that's something we didn't predict that there would be a rethinking of VS Code. I think either of us would have thought like, oh, VS Code is just going to get either an extension or copilot features.

• 1:00:46Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I wouldn't have called the fork.

• 1:00:48Scott Tolinski?

  Fork. Yeah, would not have called that. Or that a fork of it would have actually taken off because there has been forks in different ways. But yeah, the fork took off for sure. Small models that run in the browser. I have not used any small models that run in the browser, but I think you have, right?

• 1:01:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, I used a bunch this year. Depth detection, background removal.

• 1:01:08Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I did. Yes.

• 1:01:09Wes Bos?

  Whisper.

• 1:01:11Scott Tolinski?

  OCR. I used OCR.

• 1:01:12Wes Bos?

  OCR. Yeah, Transformers JS is is behind a lot of those. It's really exciting that you can run those in in the browser. But on the flip side, also, we saw a lot of, not for the smaller stuff, that's good, but for all of the like coding AI stuff. Almost nobody is like training their own coding models now. They're all using Claude or OpenAI.

• 1:01:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, which are great. Apps get Sherlocked by OpenAI.

• 1:01:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that that probably happened at some point.

• 1:01:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no, definitely. There were. I mean, you know, earlier in the days of OpenAI stuff, everybody was filling in missing functionality on top of it. And now it's like, oh, yeah, I think, just like Apple, I think anytime they release anything, it's shutting down a couple of people. So.

• 1:02:04Wes Bos?

  We said on prem corporate AI. I don't know. This probably happened. I think probably the closest thing to that is Facebook's Llama model, which you can just download and run yourself, along with like a lot of models. But like, the Llama model is up with stable diffusion are some of the like, big ones that you can can run yourself that can run with the the big boys Claude and OpenAI. So I would give myself a two out of 10 on that one.

• 1:02:34Scott Tolinski?

  No, be be grateful with yourself. You you get a 10 out of 10 on all of them. Because I can definitely wiggle myself into a position to say, all of these succeeded in some regard. We can make up something. But no, as as usual, we did a great job predicting the last year and I can't wait for our prediction episode that will be released. And I do want to say this because we didn't say this off the jump when we said that we're going to be changing the format. We're actually going to be taking a small holiday break. So today is the 23rd. We will not be releasing an episode on on Christmas, or that Friday, or that next Monday. And we will be back with a potluck on January 1st for you. And

• 1:03:19Scott Tolinski?

  then the next episode is going to be our year prediction. So January 6th, I'm super excited. One of my favorite episodes of the year, because I get to feel smart without actually having to have the consequences for it until next year, right? So, yeah, that's what we got. Do you have anything else, Wes? Anything you want to say before the end of the year here?

• 1:03:38Wes Bos?

  It was a great year. Thanks to everybody who who made it such a great year. Lots of really neat stuff came out, lots of really cool open source projects. Still love web development. Looking forward to another year of it.

• 1:03:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, likewise. And I do want to say in addition to that, thank you specifically to everybody who came to either one of our meetups, either one this year or before, or anybody who filled out our survey, who has left a comment, been a part of this community. That survey really was really great for us, and I'm sure we'll be doing more in the future if you want to tell us how you feel, but tell us how you feel anyways. We love to hear from you.

• 1:04:16Wes Bos?

  Send your feedback in any means possible at any time because we love it.

• 1:04:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, and specifically Wes likes it more than I when you're very critical. Yeah. When we were doing the survey form, Wes was like, can you write on there to be very harsh and very critical? And I was just like, no, don't do that. I don't want to hear that.

• 1:04:38Wes Bos?

  No, I like it when people give it to me straight because it's like, ah, you might be wrong, but also there's probably some, some good stuff in there.

• 1:04:46Scott Tolinski?

  I like it when people protect my fragile feelings here. So let's get into it before we head out for the year. Let's get into sick picks and shameless plugs. I have a sick pick for us today. My son, just like most other seven year olds, is extremely into Pokemon, very, very into Pokemon. Specifically, he's been like playing the card game. He's in like a Pokemon card game club after school and stuff. And as a parent, and somebody grew, I had Pokemon when I was in middle school, but maybe not the card game, right? I had the first, I had the blue cartridge. I never picked up the card game ever once. And so he's playing the card game and I'm like,

• 1:05:27Scott Tolinski?

  you know what? It would be really great if I could play this with him and I don't want to, you know, figure out the rules. But there is an app now on iOS and Android. I don't know, my camera will not. Either way, it's called Pokemon, Pokemon TCGP, Pokemon, the Card Game Pocket. And it is the card game and I, you open little packs of cards. And actually Wes, you might enjoy some UI elements on this. I don't know if I can even.

• 1:05:57Wes Bos?

  I would enjoy Pokemon. I say, I tell you, I will not enjoy Pokemon.

• 1:06:02Scott Tolinski?

  No, but the UI and and I won't even like, um, I can't even, I can't show you this because my camera won't focus on it. But either way, um, the UI has these little packs of cards and it's 3D. You can spin it around. You swipe your finger over the top to open it and the cards come out and if if the card is, if the pack is backwards, the cards come out backwards and you have to flip them around to see what they are. It is a delightful thing, but it taught me how to play the card game and now I can play the card game with my son, which has been a lot of fun. I feel like I'm connecting with him on that level and uh, he's very excited to open the virtual packs of cards in the games. Just don't fall for the microtransaction trap and it's all good.

• 1:06:44Wes Bos?

  You know what? I bet I met a guy at the conference and I was like, where do you work? He's like, I work at Pokemon.

• 1:06:49Scott Tolinski?

  No way.

• 1:06:51Wes Bos?

  I was like, oh man, that's amazing. He's like, yeah, he's like, I learned from your courses and now I have a job at Pokemon and I was like, did you have to use the Pokemon API in your uh?

• 1:07:02Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:03Wes Bos?

  Because that API is is used in everything. He's like, it's funny because all the jobs I didn't get, we use the Pokemon API as my like take home.

• 1:07:11Scott Tolinski?

  That's awesome.

• 1:07:12Wes Bos?

  So maybe he he worked on that. I'm I'm curious what the tech is behind that. That's pretty cool.

• 1:07:18Scott Tolinski?

  I applied for a company that did Pokemon's website in Flash back in 2008. And I was very distressed when I didn't get the job because it was in Tokyo and that would have been awesome.

• 1:07:28Wes Bos?

  That would have been cool. Um, I'm going to sick pick something for my kids as well. Um, and that is just buying a huge ass bag of Croc Charms. Um, my kids are crazy about Croc Charms. And they like, they sell them at the store for a dollar or whatever, but I was like, you know what? We gotta like, like I know how to source stuff. So I I think I bought like 500 or something like that and they just lay them out on the carpet and they go through them and and pick their favorite ones and then we use them as like, um, If you do your chores, you get to have a croc charm and then they bring them to school and they give them to their friends or they trade them and like it's just currency. So I forget who it was that told me that like, yeah, Pokemon cards for like doing your chores

• 1:08:13Wes Bos?

  or whatever. Our house is croc charms.

• 1:08:14Scott Tolinski?

  That was me. I said that.

• 1:08:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Okay. There you go. It works well. And I think we should get syntax croc charms because they're, they're very fun.

• 1:08:23Scott Tolinski?

  Let's do it. Yes. Nobody else out there, nobody steal that. We're doing that.

• 1:08:28Wes Bos?

  Syntax, yeah.

• 1:08:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Wes Bos?

  Well, I'll order them right now.

• 1:08:31Scott Tolinski?

  Call them out.

• 1:08:31Wes Bos?

  Web development croc charms, maybe.

• 1:08:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Get a CRT up in there. Cool. Well, check us out on YouTube, Syntax FM on YouTube. We'll release everything. We will catch you so much more there in the next year. And thank you so much for hanging with us this year. It's been awesome.

• 1:08:47Wes Bos?

  Peace.

• 1:08:48Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.