Lighthouse 6.1, VSCode 1.47, and tracking frameworks performance with Perf Track | Front End News

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Front End News. It's been a fairly quiet week, but I do hope you will find the following topics both interesting and useful.

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Lighthouse 6.1

We just got a significant update to Lighthouse. The most notable feature is that now the tool can use JS source maps to improve the unused-javascript audit.

Oh, and the labels now read as KiB instead of KB.

There are two new audits coming in:

• long-tasks is a new diagnostic showing the longest main-thread-blocking tasks during load
• crawlable-anchors is a new SEO audit that checks that anchors link to resolvable URLs

More changes can be found under the hood, including some new experimental features, updated dependencies, and more. The full release notes are available via the link below.

The new 6.1 version is scheduled to be available with the Chrome 86 update (scheduled for early October). That can be a long time to wait, so if you want to try the new features, you should download Chrome Canary which is currently being used to test-run version 86.

• https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/blob/master/changelog.md#610-2020-06-25
• https://www.google.com/chrome/canary/

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Software updates and releases

Here are the updates and releases for this edition. In each case, you can find the full details in the release notes linked down below.

VSCode 1.47

• https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_47

Yarn 2.1.0

• https://github.com/yarnpkg/berry/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#210

React Native 0.63

• https://reactnative.dev/blog/2020/07/06/version-0.63

ESLint v7.4.0

• https://eslint.org/blog/2020/07/eslint-v7.4.0-released

Fastify 3.0.0

• https://github.com/fastify/fastify/releases/tag/v3.0.0

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Interesting things worth having a look at

I also stumbled upon the following news items and I think they were way too interesting to be ignored, but they were also not fitting in the normal episode structure.

Perf Track

• https://perf-track.web.app/

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That's all there is in this edition. If you want a front-row seat to the selection process for the next episode, join me on Twitch every Saturday (go to twitch.tv/frontendnexus at 20:00 EEST).

You might also want to subscribe to the YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgACtqiDmnSaskDIBsK54ww. I am working on bringing you new content there, such as the recent interview with Katie Fenn on the power of developer communities. As always, your support is highly appreciated.

Have a great and productive week, keep yourselves safe and I will see you next time!