NOTE: This is issue #020 of my newsletter, which went live on Monday, March 8th. 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.
Browser news take the front page this week. Brave enters the search engine market, Chrome 89 update rolled out to users, and the Flow browser is now available for Raspberry Pi devices. WAI-ARIA 1.2 is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation, while the venerable jQuery has reached version 3.6.0.
WAI-ARIA 1.2 is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation.
The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (a.k.a. WAI-ARIA) defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities.
The latest iteration of the suite (1.2) has now reached the status of Candidate Recommendation. As a result, the ARIA Working Group is now asking for implementations as part of the next step of the process.
Browser news
Brave
The Brave browser plans to enter the search market. They have recently acquired the open-source engine Tailcat to power the new Brave Search. For more details I'm giving you not just the official press release, but some articles from major publications as well.
- Search | Brave Browser
- EndGadget: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
- Forbes: Brave Battles Google Amid Growing Demand For Privacy
- PCWorld: Brave Search is a privacy-first search engine
- Wired: Privacy-first browser Brave now has its own Google search rival
Chrome
Chrome 89 is now rolling out to all users. This version brings stable support for WebHID, WebNFC, and Web Serial. It is also closing a loophole a few developers used to skirt the PWA installability checks.
We're also getting a preview on the upcoming changes in Chrome 90. It will bring new debugging tools for CSS flexbox, an overlay for the Core Web Vitals, and many other features.
We can now expect the Chrome updates to happen more often. From now on, a new update will happen every four weeks, instead of the current six-week cycle. The same thing will happen to the V8 engine release cycle as well. This is scheduled to begin in September, with the release of Chrome 94.
Flow
The Flow browser, developed by the British company Ekioh, is a fairly new player on the browser scene. It sports a completely new multi-threaded rendering engine that does not have any relation to WebKit, Gecko, or Blink. And now it is available to use on all Raspberry Pi computers.
Software updates and Releases
- Deno 1.8 - a secure JavaScript and TypeScript runtime
- Flutter 2 - build beautiful apps for mobile and beyond
- Electron 12.0.0 - build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
- Gatsby 3.0 - build blazing fast, modern apps and websites with React
- jQuery 3.6.0 - fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library
- Node v15.11.0 - JavaScript runtime
- pixi.js v6.0.0 - the HTML5 Creation Engine
- VSCode February 2021 (version 1.54) - free source-code editor
- vue-i18n-next v9.0.0 - Vue I18n for Vue 3
Wrapping things up
That's all I have prepared for this issue. Have a great and productive week, keep yourselves safe, and I will see you next time!
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