Web Weekly #167
- Published at
- Updated at
- Reading time
- 9min
Are you ready for CSS anchor positioning to land? Do you know about the latest regular expressions features? And do you understand how color spaces really work?
Turn on the Web Weekly tune and find some answers below. Enjoy!
Paweล listens to "Judy Kuhn - Colors of the Wind (live, 1996)" and says:
Pocahontas is one of my favorite films ever, and 30 years later I still cry every time I hear this song. Beautiful!
Do you want to share your favorite song with the Web Weekly community? Hit reply; there are no more songs left in the queue and the Web Weekly jukebox will be silent next week. ๐ฑ๐จ
You probably have heard of the Arc browser. It's this good-looking Chromium wrapper with the fancy sidebar, split views, and UX sparkles to copy or previews URLs. The company behind it ("The Browser Company") wanted it to become the next Google Chrome.
As it turns out, Arc did not become the next browser for the masses. It became a polished niche product for technical power users. The majority of "web surfers" aren't power users and don't care about keyboard shortcuts, split views or "easels".
And that's a problem for the company with the modest name because how should they pay back the received VC money if Arc's growth rate isn't 30x. And even if you consider the die-hard fans; would they pay real money for a browser? Questionable.
The Browser Company had to switch gears and is now... drum rolls... building an AI browser. How creative is that! Isn't OpenAI building an AI browser? Yep. And Perplexity does that, too, right? And isn't Google placing Gemini in Chrome as well? You bet! That's some strong competition in this space. Great choice, but what happens with the beloved Arc now?
Arc is now in maintenance mode and we'll all have to see how much maintenance the browser will actually receive. But here's the kicker of this intro, I've started using Zen and this small open source project is shaping up very nicely!
I've already tried the Firefox-powered browser nine months ago and it wasn't there (yet). At the time, it felt like a poor Arc clone. It's a different story now. It feels more polished and supports the features I care about: split view, workspaces, compact mode, a command palette, and link previews. It's not reinventing the wheel with growth hacks, but making browsing the web a bit nicer! And not more.
Of course, I have to see if I'll stick to Zen, but let me be honest; using an open source browser feels much better than one powered by VC ethics and growth hacks. And I might even hope that the level of enshitification stays at a minimum. I hope it stays zen.
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I won't spoil the fun, but guess what you'll have to do at whereisthesloth? ๐
I don't see it here in Europe, but Google Search seems to have shipped cross-document view transitions. For a flagship product like Google Search, this is quite a big deal.
Jason and Bramus cover progressive enhancement, blocking="render" and other stumbling stones when implementing the new and fancy! The world would be a better place if more case studies would be as practical as this one.
That said, if you want to learn about reasons why your view transitions are misbehaving, "View Transitions: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" will point you in the right direction.
Anchor positioning already ships in Chrome and will land in Safari 26. And even though Firefox has yet to join the party, I think it's time to slowly start looking into them.
As always, Ahmad is doing a fabulous job explaining the new web features with many interactive examples and I love that he's covering every-day use cases going beyond the common tool tip.
And if you're more of a playful type, Anchoreum is a game similar to the good ol' Flexbox Froggy teaching you anchor positioning.
Did you notice that JavaScript regular expressions became wildly good over the last years? There are now a unicode and unicodesets mode, named capture groups, and lookbehinds. If you're not into regular expressions, I totally get it. But you must admit this is cool stuff, isn't it?
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Here's an absolute internet classic for the ice cream lovers. Rashiq reverse engineered an internal McDonald's API to figure out which ice cream machines are broken. What to do with it?
Easy! Register mcbroken, query all the stores and visualize where you can have a McD ice cream and where you cannot.
This post is very long but, trust me, it's worth it. If you ever wondered about gamut, oklch, display-p3 color and all these other confusing terms. Dan explains color spaces and all you need to know very very well!
Chrome 139 shipped a new CSS property: corner-shape (there's no MDN entry?). Initially, I couldn't really think of use cases other than the famous squircle but after reading Amit's post, I'm excited!
Hand to the heart; have you seen this funky CSS syntax before? @font-feature-values? What?
You know, I'm no font nerd, but Oleh put together a post packed with so many facts that I can only shout "I had no idea!".
From the unlimited MDN knowledge archive...
Do you know there's a JS API to send a final beacon when someone closes the page and the data is sent reliably, asynchronously and doesn't impact the new page? That's right!
Now, and if you don't think sendBeacon() is a banger, check out the experimental method fetchLater()... Did I get you with that one?
I learned that forms without an accessible name won't be exposed as landmark regions. They'll be generic elements. So, if you think that just using the form element is enough, better check out the article.
Find more short web development learnings in my "Today I learned" section.
I'm super duper excited about invoker commands and while it seems early times, Mozilla and Apple seemed to have started working on them. The declarative web is calling and I'm so there for it!
- lint-staged/lint-staged โ Run tasks like formatters and linters against staged git files.
- projectwallace/css-code-quality โ Calculate the Code Quality score of your CSS.
- julienXX/terminal-notifier โ Send User Notifications on macOS from the command-line.
Disclaimer; I've only played with Vecto3d briefly, but if it really transforms vector graphics into 3d models, that'd be dang cool!
Find more single-purpose online tools on tiny-helpers.dev.
Here's Vale's periodic reminder to treat your open source maintainers nicely.
Access to someone else's code is not an entitlement to their time, attention, or additional labour.
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And with that, take care of yourself - mentally, physically, and emotionally.
I'll see you next week! ๐
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Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.