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Cover image for Compat 2021 Update, Chrome 97, Firefox 96, Safari 15.2, Ember 4.0, Jasmine 4.0, and more  | Front End News #048
Adrian Sandu
Adrian Sandu

Posted on • Originally published at frontendnexus.com

Compat 2021 Update, Chrome 97, Firefox 96, Safari 15.2, Ember 4.0, Jasmine 4.0, and more | Front End News #048

NOTE: This is issue #048 of my newsletter, which went live on Monday, January 17th. 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.


Compat 2021 yielded great results in improving cross-browser compatibility. Chrome 97 introduced the WebTransport API. Firefox 96 comes with improved performance and security. Safari 15.2 and Safari Technology Preview 137 rolled out to users. Ember 4.0 and Jasmine 4.0.0 lead the updates section and don't forget to apply the January Security Updates for your Node installation.


Compat 2021 Holiday Update

I was glad to see all major browser vendors come together to work on the Compat 2021 initiative. And the results are visible for us all. Where 2021 started with scores between 64 and 69 for the stable versions, now all browsers pass the 90 points threshold.

The end of the year announcement of the Chromium team gives us more details on each focus area. The initiative is planned to continue in 2022 as well, under the name Interop 2022. Discussions are underway to decide the focus points.


Browser news

Chrome

Chrome 97 rolled out at the start of the year. Here are the main changes that arrived in this update:

  • WebTransport is a new API offering low-latency, bidirectional, client-server messaging
  • You can use feature detection to see what types of scripts a browser supports
  • It's easier to search JavaScript arrays from the end with the new findLast() and findLastIndex() static methods.

More details on these topics and the other things included in the update can be found in the official release notes linked below:

Firefox

Firefox users received an update as well to version 96. Here are the main changes:

  • The main-thread load has been lowered
  • All cookies will have by default a SameSite=lax attribute which helps defend against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks
  • The Web Locks API allows scripts running in different service workers or tabs to coordinate with each other.
  • Added CSS color-scheme support to allow web pages to indicate which color schemes they can be rendered with (such as system dark mode).
  • You can now use hwb() values to specify colors in CSS

More details are available in the release notes below:

WebKit

Safari 15.2 went out to all users running iOS and iPadOS 15.2 and macOS 12.1. Here are the main WebKit features that are now available to everyone:

  • WebAssembly apps can now access up to 4GB of memory
  • The new Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy (COOP) and Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy (COEP) HTTP response headers can enable process isolation and access to shared memory
  • Wide gamut support for Canvas

You can find more details in the articles below:

Safari Technology Preview 137 arrived as well, bringing support for :has() CSS pseudo-class and many other features, fixes, and updates:


Software updates and releases


Wrapping things up

That's about all I have for the first update of 2022. 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 me on Twitter. Each one of these helps me out, and I would appreciate your consideration.

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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