We don't know the future, but we can try to predict it. As pointless as it may seem, reviewing past predictions and researching upcoming trends and forecasts can help us verify if we are still heading in the right direction, as an individual developer, as a team, or as humanity. Excuse this slightly clickbaity post, but I hope that I have a point. Scroll past the 2026 section if you don't care about my collected and interpolated guesses, skip my 2025 predictions review, after which I'll get straight to the point, including facts like release roadmaps and event schedules.
2026 Web Design, Colors, and Inspiration
Some say, 2026 will continue the brownstone trend of mocha mousse, last year's color of the year. Others can't wait for a return of bold and saturated colors and expressive gradients. Likewise in fashion, will the normcore trend persist, or will bolder and brighter colors and styles dominate mainstream fashion in 2026 and beyond?
On and Off the Cloud
Shortly after the dramatic Cloudflare outage, Pantone revealed Cloud Dancer, "a vanilla-whipped, fluffy off-white," as their color of the year, just when we thought it could not get more boring.
Which colors trend 2026 and what do they mean?
Just when influencers expected the new color trends for 2026 "show a shift towards richer, deeper hues with a focus on expressive, timeless, and emotionally resonant colors". Veranda magazine nominated silk road red in times where trade keeps shifting in favor of China, while others turn to the Western world's past to find stability and inspiration.
Security, warmth and traditionalism are often associated with beige, brown, and warm mahogany tones, while "warm eucalyptus" even sounds like something you drink when you have a cold and "transformative teal" rhymes with "heal" and sounds a little esoteric to me.
This year's cover image is based on a prompt-generated AI image made with DEV's forem post cover editor. The font Little Character, based on the iconic LITT.CHR used on most vintage circuit boards, will be added to Google fonts in 2026.
Some of its colors remotely resemble predictions for the color of the year 2026, others, like deep pink, retro purple and cyan betray DEV's new prompt-based post image generator. The result might be seen as a bold statement against more boring beige and so-called conservatism in politics and pop culture. However, neon retro futurism isn't necessarily all bright. The New York Times magazine described it as a visual sign of current tech innovations making dystopian visions like "cyberpunk 's high tech low life" become reality (Casey Michael Henry: Why Does So Much New Technology Feel Inspired by Dystopian Sci-Fi Movies?).
Diversity of Sub-Trends in 2026
Web designs has long been divided into different sub-trends. While designers and dex-UX-oriented indie web developers have explored playful retrofuturism and neobrutalism in recent years, mainstream customer-facing frontends tended more towards a polished high street aesthetics that might have been influenced by AI. Developer-oriented mainstream is already more colorful and playful with gradients and a mixture of science-fiction and retro, undermining the promise of a bright new future with an ironic undertone.
2026 Web Tech and Global Technology Trends
In 2026, we might see another new JavaScript trend or framework or library, otherwise we won't know we're still alive as frontend developers. 2026 will surely see new software, acquisistions and rebranded names, as well as updates to long-standing established pillars of the web, like React, PHP, and WordPress. None of this is a surprising prediction though.
Bursting Bubble vs. "Top Technology Trends" 2026
Many business analysts predict that the "AI bubble" will burst like the "internet bubble" of the millenium. We still have internet now, and we'll still have AI then. Maybe there will be no burst at all, if AI providers eventually improve consistency, quality, and efficiency. Gartner sounds more optimistic hoping for technological breaktrough in the fields of artificial intelligence, including physical AI and proactive cybersecurity (Gartner Reveals 10 Strategic Technology Trends That Will Transform Businesses in 2026). Others mention decentralized finance, better human-machine interaction, space tourism and a growing emphasis on sustainability in technology and operations (Susi Wallner: Top 10 Technology Trends to Watch in 2026 and Beyond). Is it just me, or have we heard these kind of predictions before?
Update: in her Medium article What happens after the hype? Lessons from mobile internet’s long road to success in December 2025, former Microsoft, Skype, and Telefonica expert Shomila Malik compared the current AI hype to the late days of feature phones and a vision of the "mobile internet" focusing on features that nobody asked for. She questions the AI companies' business model that doesn't scale and predicts an inevitable change that might not necessarily fell like a bursting bubble from a users' perspective. However, AI in its current form lacks sustainability and usability and is thus bound to fail as soon as better alternatives will enter the market.
What will AI Images look like by March 2026?
Before Pantone's Color of the Year revelation, a Meme Monday cartoon suggests that all AI images will look like this by March 2026. What's in there? Dominant reddish, brown, and orange colors like #931a00 and #c86400 match the earthy tones predictions cited before and may also point towards Silk Road Red or a point of view wearing proverbial rose-colored glasses:
The meme points out another dilemma, that brings us back to the developer scene: layoffs, job insecurity and dissatisfaction makes more web developers question their career choice, while there is still a market of training and bootcamp promising people to become developers quickly to sit a desk and make more money, probably hoping that "vibe coding" will make that easier than ever.
Baristas are taking coding courses so they can become developers while developers are dreaming of opening cafés and becoming baristas.
Will Java-Script get built-in Type Safety?
Static type support as a native feature in JavaScript is currently not part of the ECMAScript 2026 (ECMA 262) specification, although it's a recurring crucial pain point for JavaScript developers according the recent State of JavaScript surveys. TypeScript is bound to continue its trend in 2026, as, according to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey and GitHub Octoverse reports, TypeScript usage has grown explosively, with about 43.6% of developers actively using it in 2025. It even surpassed Python and JavaScript in new contributor growth during 2025.
Will CSS become a Powerful Programming Language?
Some developers fear that CSS keeps "getting too powerful" overwhelming us with new features that many of us have never asked for. Maybe we'll even see native masonry layout grow out of its experimental implementation. Until then, we can combine stable CSS and a little JavaScript to come up with our own masonry-like tile layouts.
I will update this post with more tech predictions, event announcements, stats, and survey results when the latest State of JS results and Pantone's official color of the year have been published. However, we can already interpolate some likely outcomes from previous years.
Software Releases and Updates planned for 2026
Some are ahead of their time: "Microsoft Visual Studio 2026 was officially released in November 2025." Web browsers have become so "evergreen" we don't discuss upcoming release anymore. There is no planned release time for React 20 either, as a new major version would require a major breaktrough unlikely to expect in 2026. Likewise, WordPress 7.0 may or may not be released in 2026.
Others have a more regular release roadmap, including Android, Apple, and JetBrains. The latter will surely release a 2026.1 IDEA editor update in 2026.
I won't mind missing out on new features if products got more stable and accessible instead, but we'll have to see.
2026 Tech Events, Conferences, and Meetups
There will be developer conferences and meetups for different audiences and of different sizes. We can choose to mingle in a crowd that might fill a stadium and choose different tracks and workshop, or prefer one of the smaller single-track events that might feel more familial. After attending what might be the last Beyond Tellerrand Berlin conference for a while, I wrote down some thoughts and inspirations about this and other conferences and events that I went to in the past years: Beyond Tellerrand Berlin 2025 and Why Real-Life Conferences still matter. There will be no Beyond Tellerrand conference in Berlin in 2026, but it will happen in Düsseldorf, Germany.
More European and international conferences to look forward to as a developer or designer. This list is just an incomplete collection. Check your local networks as well!
- axe-con 2026 24-25 February 2026 (virtual online conference)
- Confoo 2026 Montreal, Canada 25-27 February 2026
- Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2026, 2-5 March 2026
- SXSW Conference and Festivals 2026, Austin, Texas, March 12-18, 2026
- React Advanced Toronto 2026 March 24 2026
- React Paris 2026, 26-27 March 2026
- SmashingConf Amsterdam 2026 for designers and UI engineers, 13-16 April 2026
- JCON EUROPE 2026, Cologne, 20-23 April 2026
- Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026, 27-28 April 2026
- stackconf 2026, Munich, 28-29 April 2026
- CSS Day Amsterdam 2026, 11-12 June 2026
- Freelance Unlocked Berlin 2026, 11-12 June 2026
- React Summit Amsterdam 2026, 12 + 16 Juni 2026
- enterJS Mannheim 2026, 16-17 June 2026
- GITEX EUROPE 2026, Berlin, 30 June - 1 July 2026
- We Are Developers Berlin 2026, 8-10 July 2026
- FrOSCon, Bonn, Germany, 15-16 August 2026
- SmashingConf Freiburg 2026 for front-end developers and designers, 7-10 September 2026
- SmashingConf Antwerp 2026: design & UX,, 12-15 October 2026
- React Advanced London 2026 - tba.
- React Summit New York 2026 - tba.
- RenderCon Nairobi 2026 - tba.
- EcoCompute - tba.
- Web Summit Lisbon 2026 - tba.
Past Review and 2025 Statistics
Let's look back at last year's attempt at clairvoyance and what it can teach us about the future.
One year ago, I researched and collected experts' expectiations, tried to sum up my own experience and interpolate it, and add some subjective hunches and wishes. Now, we can look back and see some nice stats and data visualization.
GenAI and Google's Zero-Click Crisis
In GenAI, ChatGPT was "both the most-used (91.2%) and most-loved (53.1%) model provider" while "runner-up Claude is not very far behind in terms of positive sentiment with 45.9%" according to the State of Web Dev AI survey 2025. Fifty percent isn't a lot of love, if you ask me. Although 67.5% of last years's StackOverflow survey respondents "admire" Claude, "more developers actively distrust the accuracy of AI tools than trust it" and "66% of developers are frustrated with AI solutions that are almost right," according to the same survey. Mentioning StackOverflow, its engagement numbers have been declining since the advent of ChatGPT in 2022 and dropping even quicker in 2025 (Eric Holscher: Stack Overflow’s decline). Google search managed to maintain its regular user base, partially thanks to emerging Asian markets, but about 58% of all Google searches ended without a click to any website, also known as "the zero-click crisis". (Google Search Statistics 2025: What the Numbers Reveal).
Parasocial Agentic AI Slop Rage Bait Clanker Broligarchy
Official "words of the year" 2025 include parasocial, AI slop and rage bait, beating aura farming and biohack in the Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year 2025 shortlist. Dictionary.com chose 6-7 over agentic, clanker, broligarchy, and tradwife, while biodeutsch was nominated the German non-word of the year 2025. Overall trends in common: AI and cultural backlash. How does that fit together?
2025 wasn't the first year of rage bait providing seemingly justified reasons for rant writing, and I wish I'd see a good reason why 2026 should be different.
The phrase "to see red" is an idiom that means to become suddenly and uncontrollably angry, but on the other hand, red sits next to rose in the color sprectrum, reminding me of the aforementioned rose-colored glasses that we'll probably need for the sake of self-care and protection. Which brings us back to the innocuous topic of colors.
What was the real color of the year?
How to evaluate and measure what has become a year's trend color, apart from reading other people's opinions or asking AI? Well, let's ask an AI to search the web and tell us what were the trending colors of 2025?
What were the Trending Colors of 2025?
The trending colors of 2025 included a mix of deep, earthy, vibrant, and pastel tones that reflect sophistication, nature connection, optimism, and emotional grounding. Major trending hues were:
azul profundo (also known as deep blue), future dusk, aura indigo, dill green, emerald green, turquoise, golden curry, butter yellow, pale pink, cherry red, terracotta (earthy warm tones reflecting tradition, sustainability, and biophilic design), and Mocha Mousse, a warm brown hue chosen as Pantone's Color of the Year 2025, imbued with richness.
In last year's predictions, I mentioned Future Dusk and Rebeccapurple, Mocha Mousse, Boring Beige, Yellow, Aqua, and Organic Colors. So we might say, that I did not completely miss the target.
Reasons for Shifting Trends
Why would such a trend shift occur, for which reasons? Marketing? Societal shifts? Popular demand? Answers might include the observation that "brands are responding to consumer fatigue with fleeting trends and a demand for timeless, authentic colors that support wellness and personal resilience." But how is that different in 2026 as compared to 2025 or before, as the world-wide polycrisis is nothing new? I chose the "color of the year" trends and the AI's wish-wash, quoting doubtful sources, as an example for the futility of trying to make sense of things that don't make much sense at all.
Will Normcore Continue to Trend in 2026?
Concerning fashion, the world is as divided and ephemeral, but with a strong focus towards security, normcore, and boredom, buying from questionable cheap fast fashion brands instead of recognizing local hand-made quality. The preppy normcore trend towards classic buttoned-up shirts and cardigans might be seen as a move towards modest fashion and more conservative and traditional styles and convictions.
I had intended to create a positive framing combining the conservative trend with inclusive job staffing and an alternative haircut, paired with predicted trend colors and tech topics. In reality, that person is still a bearded white guy in most tech companies though.
Astro, Accessibility, and Inclusive Climate Action
I'm still waiting for more customers and their lawyers striving to improve their websites' accessibility after the European accessibility legislation has become effective in Germany this year. Not mentioning other areas of our daily lives, like a package of noodles with a small, 8 point sizes text in a light yellow color on a semi-transparent dark-yellow background.
Inclusive climate action is happening, despite political backlash, the economy knows that renewable energy, innovative transportation, and more efficient computing hardware and software is important and pays off, even more so in times of rising demand despite stagnant profits.
Islands architecture, maybe the smallest and most nerdy aspects on last year's list, is definitely also a thing. While Astro does not solve all of our problems, developers have long been looking for an alternative to Next.js and similar solutions based on pure React apps, while React itself keeps focusing and improving on server-side rendering and performance optimization, for a good reason.
Astro does come with some problems of its own, but it also defaults to a new tech stack ecosystem beyond the dreaded Webpack legacy. Vite, Vitest, and Vite dev server are here to stay, and so are React, Storybook, TypeScript, and Tailwind. And so are CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. Start with the basics as a junior developer and don't forget where we come from, when you're a senior.
Where is the Web Industry heading in 2026 and beyond?
So, looking back, and forward, where is our industry headin in 2026 and beyond? Will we still be (web) developers in five years time? Or will we be working in a hospital or at a construction site together with former UX and web designers, while everyone else is either "vibe coding" or trying to use the software written by AI agents? Who knows?
Who knows? Some more Questions
What do people want to know about future tech in 2026? According to Answer The Public, the need orientation, tools, and support! Some real users' quotes include the following queries.
- Which web hosting services support the latest web technologies for 2026?
- Where can I find tools to implement the 2026 web trends in my online shop?
- How to leverage AI-based web design features to meet the trends for 2026?
- Which digital marketing strategies will web industry leaders use in 2026?
- What web design trends for 2026 are recommended by leading agencies?
- Did Ingo use AI to write this post? (Yes, I did, at least partially.)
- Are these predictions complete and factually correct? (No, they aren't.)
Conclusion: What will 2026 change for you and me?
Maybe more importantly: what do I expect and hope next year? More money , more impact, more collaborations? Things to explore, experiment and sell to customers? Stop getting upset about things I can't fix or at least not with respect to my priorities? Spend less time coding and more time with people, art, and travel?
What are your hopes, resolutions and expectations?
Tell me in the comments!
Top comments (2)
2026 web trends forecast post updated and republished on October 21, 2026 with a new cover image thanks to DEV's new retrofuturist neon image generator. A German version was published on Medium: Prognosen für Web, Design und Technologie für 2026 — und meine Vorjahres-Progonosen im Faktencheck
Shortly after the dramatic 2025 Cloudflare outage, Pantone revealed Cloud Dancer, "a vanilla-whipped, fluffy off-white," as their color of the year 2026. Coincidence?