NOTE: This is issue #033 of my newsletter, which went live on Monday, June 14th. 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.
Apple held the attention of the tech world with the WWDC21 event last week. And an important part was taken by the changes coming to WebKit and Safari. Big parts of the Internet suffered a hiccup when Fastly, a major CDN provider, suffered a brief outage. Vivaldi 4.0 starts providing a viable alternative to Big Tech companies, and Microsoft released a transition guide from Internet Explorer to Edge. And the software updates of the week include Cypress v7.5.0, Mocha v9.0.0, the roadmap to React 18, and more.
The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2021
Apple hosted the 2021 edition of their developer conference last week. There were about 200 sessions this year, but I only picked a handful, related to web technologies. If you want more, I've included a link to the entire set of videos.
The main attraction is Safari 15 Beta. This update will bring important features for web developers, such as support for aspect-ratio for box elements, redesigned form controls in iOS, or support for ES6 Modules in Workers and ServiceWorkers, to name just a few.
What other things were covered? Safari Web Extensions are getting better, and are now available on iOS. Manipulation of web content in apps is now easier with the latest WKWebView additions. Web Authentication is moving beyond passwords. And the Web Inspector Improvements include a new overlay for inspecting CSS Grid containers on your pages, more configurable breakpoints to make debugging simpler, and the ability to create and edit Audits.
I'm stopping here with the enumeration and I invite you, instead, to browse the entire collection of video presentations using the last link in the set below. Enjoy!
- WebKit Features in Safari at WWDC21
- Explore Safari Web Extension improvements
- Safari 15 Beta Release Notes
- WWDC21 videos
How fragile is the Internet?
Many people never heard of Fastly before last week, when a glitch with this large CDN provider caused major outages all over the Internet. The issue was solved fast, but it outlines a possibly larger problem - how fragile is the Internet? I can't answer that question for you, so I've picked up instead a couple of articles that highlight the details of the outage.
- Fastly: Summary of June 8 outage
- US News: Global Glitch: Swaths of Internet Go Down After Cloud Outage
- Reuters: Fastly blames software bug for major global internet outage
- Fortune: Just one individual brought a huge chunk of the Internet down on Tuesday
Browser news
Edge
Microsoft published a "Getting Started Guide" for people that need to migrate their apps from the old Internet Explorer into the Edge browser.
Vivaldi
Vivaldi is definitely aiming high. They just launched version 4 of their browser for both desktop and Android platforms. Their main target is to provide an alternative to "Big Tech" with a set of new features.
The main piece in their arsenal is Vivaldi Translate, a functionality powered by Lingvanex. There are also beta versions for Vivaldi Mail, Vivaldi Feed Reader, and Vivaldi Calendar. Vivaldi claims this update provides a real alternative to the solutions from Google or Microsoft.
Software updates and releases
- Cypress v7.5.0 - fast, easy, and reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser
- Ghost 4.7.0 - a headless Node.js CMS
- html-to-text v8.0.0 - advanced html to text converter
- Mocha v9.0.0 - a JavaScript test framework
- PM2 v5.0.0 - Node production process manager with a built-in load balancer
- QUnit v2.16.0 - a JavaScript unit testing framework
- React 18 roadmap
- useSound v4.0 - a React Hook for playing sound effects
- Vue v3.1.0 Pluto - a JavaScript framework for building UI on the web.
- VS Code May 2021 (version 1.57)
Wrapping things up
That's all I prepared for this issue. If you found something useful please recommend us to a friend and help us continue to grow.
Have a great and productive week, keep yourselves safe, and I will see you next time!
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