[kingcharles]

I've been a web designer since 1993. It was nice in 1993 because you didn't even have a background color. The color of your page was the default color of the window on your OS. Usually grey.

Then we went through 25 years of dark ages where there were plenty of really great ideas for layout which were completely lost to horrible and competing and half-assed executions.

We are now finally in the golden age of layout where I can make something that looks great on all displays if I have the time and talent to do it. Sadly that is in short supply.

I think we have Chrome to thank for modern web design. Once the browser competition was completely and utterly crushed and everyone was forced to sign on to The One True Layout Engine the benevolent dictators at Google set things on the right path.

There are still edges cases (which JPEG replacement will win?!), but they are now blessedly few and far between.

[cubefox]

> I think we have Chrome to thank for modern web design.

I think it's less the dominance of Chrome itself and more the demise of Internet Explorer. The problem was that it didn't get updated like normal software, it was somehow tied to the OS, so old outdated versions lingered around for far too long, limiting what technologies web developers could use.

> There are still edges cases (which JPEG replacement will win?!), but they are now blessedly few and far between.

Last I heard was that the Benevolent Dictators at Google decided that AVIF shall win.

[Hamuko]

>The problem was that it didn't get updated like normal software, it was somehow tied to the OS, so old outdated versions lingered around for far too long, limiting what technologies web developers could use.

Now that mantle is taken up by Safari, especially on mobile.