NOTE: This is issue #063 of my newsletter, which went live on Monday, May 9th. If you find this information useful and interesting and you want to receive future issues as they are published, ahead of everyone else, I invite you to join the subscriber list at frontendnexus.com.
We have another week where browser news takes the front stage. Firefox 100 is now out there, after more than 17 years since the 2004 launch. The release notes for Chrome 101 are finally available. And Mac users can explore the new WebKit features in Safari Technology Preview 144. As for the software updates, this week we got mocha v10.0.0, npm v8.9.0, and more.
Celebrating Firefox 100
This week it was time for Firefox to break the 100 versions threshold. It took more than 17 years to reach this point, as Firefox 1 was announced in November 2004.
This release includes many features related to video playback, such as:
- Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode allows you to use captions/subtitles on YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, as well as other websites that use WebVTT (Web Video Text Track) format.
- HDR video is now supported in Firefox on Mac
- Hardware-accelerated AV1 video decoding is enabled on Windows with supported GPUs
- Video overlay is enabled on Windows for Intel GPUs
I'm glad to see that they changed the way scrollbars are displayed by default on Linux and Windows 11. On these platforms, the scrollbars won't reduce anymore the viewport size.
And that's not all there is in this update. There are many performance and security improvements as well. For the full list, you should check the release notes linked below.
Browser news
Chrome
I mentioned last week that there was no blog post describing the new features in Chrome 101. That article arrived this week though and I invite you to explore it.
WebKit
There is a new Safari Technology Preview release for Mac users, this one bearing number 144. There is a long list of fixes and updates, but nothing stands to my attention. If you are interested and want to know more, please check the release notes.
Software updates and releases
- Babylon.js 5.0.0 - JS game and rendering engine
- Cucumber v8.2.0 - Cucumber for JavaScript
- mocha v10.0.0 - JS test framework for node.js and the browser
- NodeBB v2.0.0 - Node.js based forum software
- npm v8.9.0 - the package manager for JavaScript
- pnpm v7.0.0 - fast, disk space efficient package manager
- resvg-js v2.0.0 - SVG renderer and toolkit
- ShareDB v3.0.0 - realtime database backend based on Operational Transformation (OT)
Wrapping things up
Ukraine is still suffering from the Russian invasion - if you are looking for ways to help, please check Smashing Magazine's article We All Are Ukraine 🇺🇦 or get in touch with your trusted charity.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, there are a couple of ways to support it. You can share the link to this issue on social media and follow this newsletter on Twitter. Each of these helps me out, and I would appreciate your consideration.
That's about all I have for this issue. Have a great and productive week, keep yourselves safe, spend as much time as possible with your loved ones, and I will see you again next time!
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