I wrote most of this post sometime in 2022 but I think it holds up alright in 2024 so I decided to publish it for posterity. I don’t really like doing posts like this—I’d much rather share some innocuous learnings or tips but it turns out I have opinions too 😓 Sorry! Since I quit Mozilla and went back to full-time Web development, I’ve discovered a few surprises. It turns out Web development is actually pretty hard, Web developers are actually very smart, and some of these frameworks and techniques we mocked as browser engineers aren’t so bad. Oops. At the same time, it turns out some Web developers have ideas about browsers and the Web that, as a former browser engineer and standards editor, I’m a bit dubious of. Here are a few of the things that surprised me.