January 12, 2025

JEM - Web in December - JavaScript Every Month Newsletter

Hello 2025 👋

Welcome to another year, with all signs pointing to AI's continued dominance. Hopefully, we'll see Apple Intelligence launch this year rather than just its announcement. Here's hoping AI will make us all more creative than before 🥂

Releases

Browsers

Safari 18.2

• contextual menu support for generating text fragment links
• @page rule to set printed page dimensions
• scrollbar-gutter and scrollbar-width are now in baseline
• cross document view transitions

React v19

After years of work, React v19 is now stable.

• Pre-warming for Suspended Trees: Improved performance with Suspense.
• React DOM Static APIs: New APIs for server-side rendering.
• Async Functions in Transitions: Handle pending states, errors, forms, and optimistic updates automatically.
• New API to read resources with use

Node 22.12.0 LTS

• require to load ESM modules is now stable
• Added resizable ArrayBuffer support in Buffer

Astro 5

• Astro Content Layer is a new flexible and pluggable way to manage content, providing a unified, type-safe API to define, load, and access your content in your Astro project, no matter where it comes from.
• astro:env module gives you a type-safe way to define the environment variables your application expects and needs.
• ships with Vite 6
• Experimental: Image cropping, responsive image layouts, SVG component.

Advent of Svelte

The Svelte team embarked on an ambitious December project this year, setting a target of releasing one feature daily for 24 days - and they succeeded.

In the Spotlight 🔦

• Github Copilot is now free with VSCode - AI assistants for everyone!
• This new IDE project from SWMansion - Radon - is impressive. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Radon integrates a simulator directly into VS Code or Cursor editor, enabling features like inspection, debugging and router integration.
• Base UI is an unstyled UI components library from the creators of Radix, Floating UI and Material UI. They are currently on their 1.0 alpha release.
• This Remotion project of generating a video of your Github contributions looks slick.

Tutorials

CSS Wrapped 2024

The Chrome team has created a page highlighting new CSS features in the browser. It's remarkable how CSS leads innovation among browser technologies, considering its origins as a simple styling language for PDF documents that developers once tried to replace.

There are codepens that accompany each feature allowing you to test them.

React Tech Stack (2025)

Robin Wieruch has created a comprehensive guide for React applications, covering both frontend and backend libraries needed to build complete applications.

How To Improve INP: React

This series on React explains the upgrade to React 18 and how its concurrent rendering features help improve the INP of webpages.

• Prioritize visible UI work and defer invisible tasks (such as analytics)
• Yield to the main thread before, or frequently during expensive JavaScript functions
• Finish execution faster – improve runtime efficiency, abort previous tasks and run less JS overall

Washing your code: don’t make me think

This post contains various opinions and while I don't agree with all of them, I appreciate the direction it's taking. The examples make it accessible to everyone.

A leap in the evolution of Airtable’s codebase: Scaling TypeScript to thousands of projects

Airtable's team discovered that TypeScript's build mode was insufficient for their growing projects (now numbering 3,000). They outline their solution using Bazel and Gazelle in this blog post.

In Other News

Best of CES 2025 - CNET

CES just concluded early January and as you can expect it is an AI world out there and we are just living in it. Robot vaccums have reached a new level this year where they just cannot just be vaccums anymore, they have to contain AI and sometimes webcams. LG StanbyMe 2 and Samsung Frame Pro are two of my favourite television models that have got an upgrade.

'It's bragging without the selfie' - The rise of Spotify Wrapped and its copycats - BBC

Spotify Wrapped demonstrates how our lives have become partially digital, with digital life-sharing emerging as a new form of self-expression. People now pursue digital-only rewards, from Snap streaks to Duolingo streaks. While NFTs may not have peaked at the right time, they haven't disappeared.

Three pieces of good news on climate change in 2024 - MIT Technology Review

Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit a new high, reaching 37.4 billion metric tons in 2024. This year is also on track to be the warmest on record, with temperatures through September hitting 1.54 °C (2.77 °F) above preindustrial levels. Global climate talks fell flat, and disasters from wildfires to hurricanes are being made worse by climate change.

But among all that (very real) negative news, there was some good, too: We saw progress cutting back on the most polluting fossil fuels, cheaper and better technologies for combating climate change, and a continuous global effort to address the problem. As we near the end of 2024, let’s take a moment to look back on some of the bright spots.

AI Updates

• OpenAI has launched a $200 monthly subscription ChatGPT Pro to access o1-mini, GPT-4o and Advanced voice.
• OpenAI has Sora out in beta, Google has also launched competing framework - Veo 2
• Gemini 2.0 is Google's next generation assistant.
• Open source LLM Deep seek v3 is the new undisputed rating champion.

Looking Ahead

• Vue.js Nation Conference - Jan 29-30