> which would be in the 2010-2013 era (peak Webkit was 2012), which I personally regard as one of the most interest times to be both on the web and be a web developer
Oh man, it depends on your definition of interesting. That was the time we had 3-5 engineers at reddit, and let me tell you, making reddit work for all the browsers was awful (and I barely had anything to do with it, it mostly fell on the other guys). It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html, because a bunch of people were still using it and it didn't support a lot of the stuff the other browsers did.
While the consolidation of browsers isn't great from a market perspective, it's been great for developers sanity. :)
Yes, dealing with IE (even IE 11, up until the last 2-3 years for me) was a pain back then, as it was circa 2020.
That said, it saw a lot of innovations broadly, web development was taken alot more seriously as a profession, and saw some interesting frameworks come out (Ember, Angular, and later React) and jQuery sure made life easier by that time.
I even have some fond memories of KnockoutJS. My most favorite, and probably most underrated framework in the history of web development, was SproutCore, which had legs at this time.
From a culture side (user?) it was the heyday of things like Delicious, Foursquare, Good Twitter (IMO) and blog rolls. Mobile web was rolling out in earnest. Alot of innovation was happening in this space.
Haha, I was interviewing for an internship in those years, and I remember asking the only webdev guy there if he thought he had the coolest job in the company (I sure thought that the web was better than Windows). The guy just looked at me like I was crazy.
Oh man, it depends on your definition of interesting. That was the time we had 3-5 engineers at reddit, and let me tell you, making reddit work for all the browsers was awful (and I barely had anything to do with it, it mostly fell on the other guys). It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html, because a bunch of people were still using it and it didn't support a lot of the stuff the other browsers did.
While the consolidation of browsers isn't great from a market perspective, it's been great for developers sanity. :)