New WebKit Features in Safari 13.1

This year’s spring releases of Safari 13.1 for macOS Catalina, iPadOS, iOS, and watchOS bring a tremendous number of WebKit improvements for the web across Apple’s platforms. All of this with many more updates for improved privacy, performance, and a host of new tools for web developers. These features stand out to me: Pointer and …

Can I Unicode‽ Unicode support across JavaScript engines

Small site by @mathias (who else?) on the Unicode support in browsers their JavaScript engines. Changes in the Unicode Standard can affect the JavaScript language. This page gives concrete examples and tracks which exact Unicode version each browser supports for each feature. What surprises me is that some engines support different Unicode versions per feature. …

What is the Fugu project?

Project Fugu is an effort to close gaps in web’s capabilities vs. native platforms. APIs that Project Fugu is delivering enable new experiences on the web while preserving the web’s core benefits of security, low-friction, and cross-platform delivery. All Project Fugu API proposals are made in the open and on the standards track. The previously …

How and when browsers load and execute JavaScript from script tags

When exactly is a script loaded and when is it executed? How do the async and defer attributes affect it? What about modules? This overview/cheatsheet sums it up nicely: The cheatsheet was extracted from this tweet by Addy Osmani

Puppeteer 2.1.0, with native Firefox support

Late January Puppeteer 2.1.0 got released, with native support for Firefox: The launcher now has an option to run Puppeteer with different browsers, starting with Firefox. Puppeteer can now talk to a real, unpatched Firefox binary. This is a first step towards eventually deprecating the separate puppeteer-firefox package in favor of supporting Firefox directly in …

Today, the Trident Era Ends

IE6 vs. the Acid2 test. It was only until IE8 that it passed Acid2. When “Edgium” got released about a month ago, Schepp also wrote an extensive piece to commemorate the Trident rendering engine. Back in the days, Microsoft was single-handedly pushing the web forward, with around 1.000(!) people working on Internet Explorer and with …

New in Chrome 80

Chrome 80 recently got released, with some nice new features. To me the highlights are: Support for Optional Chaining SVG favicons, which also support prefers-color-scheme BTW New in Chrome 80 → 💁‍♂️ Also on my list of highlights is Linking to text fragments using a special URL fragment in the form of :~:text=[prefix-,]textStart[,textEnd][,-suffix]. It’s a …

Chromium-based Edge released

Two days ago, Microsoft released their new Edge browser — the one based on Chromium. Apart from a huge change in web features support it also pushes its privacy features – the new “Browser War” – forward. With this release the version numbering also jumped from 18 to the Chromium version number it is based …

SVG favicons in Chrome

A commit that landed in Chromium (and which will be available in Chrome 80) is support for SVG favicons. 🎉 🦊 Firefox already has support for SVG favicons, ever since version 41 Since most (all?) browsers always make a request to favicon.ico you can also serve an SVG at that location with the image/svg+xml MIME …

Clicking Buttons: Inconsistent behavior across browsers

Great research by Zell Liew: I noticed browsers were inconsistent in how they handle a click on <button>. Some browsers choose to focus on the button. Some browsers don’t. In this article, I want to show you my test and findings. Then, I want to talk about a way to overcome these inconsistencies. Great to …