NOTE: This is issue #093 of my newsletter, which went live on Tuesday, March 28. 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.
In this issue we touch on a handful of AI-related topics: Mozilla pledges support to research a better, ethical AI ecosystem. GitHub unveils Copilot X, their vision for the future, and Copilot Voice, which allows you to code using voice commands.
In browser news, we discuss Edge 111, Firefox 111, Polypane 13.1, Safari 16.4, and Safari Technology Preview 166. On the Release Radar, we have stuff like ESLint v8.36.0, Mongoose 7, or TypeScript 5.0. Last but not least, we got a handful of resources, including icons, SVG shapes, font utilities, and more.
Introducing Mozilla.ai
Mozilla pledged $30M to fund Mozilla.ai - an initiative to build "a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem." This entity will focus on creating "tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent", and "people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being".
Introducing GitHub Copilot Voice and Copilot X
GitHub continues unveiling new features for Copilot. First, we got Copilot Voice, which allows you to code using voice commands without spelling everything out.
Next, we got Copilot X. This represents the future vision they have for this tool. Here is a quote from their landing page:
The “X” represents a placeholder for where we intend GitHub Copilot to become available, and what we expect it to be capable of doing (e.g. “Copilot “, “Copilot “). It is extending the product from one experience, code completion, to X experiences across the developer’s workflow. GitHub Copilot will always need to be so much more tomorrow than what it currently is today.
💻 Browser news
I am getting slightly miffed by the release schedule of the major browsers versus the schedule of this newsletter. Firefox 111 was released the next day after the previous issue was published. Chrome 112 was scheduled to be released today, but it got delayed until tomorrow. I am already a day late, so it will have to be presented in the next issue. In the long term though, I have the feeling that it will have to be me doing the adjustments, not the other way around.
Edge
Microsoft released Edge 111 on March 13. Keeping up with their progressive rollout policy, we continued to get smaller incremental updates over the last couple of weeks.
This set of updates brings a reworked Sidebar, a larger Feed on the New Tab Page, security enhancements, a new policy to clear IE mode data on browser exit, and native integration of Adobe Acrobat PDF engine into the Microsoft Edge PDF reader.
Firefox
As I mentioned above, Firefox 111 rolled out on March 14. This update brings native Windows notifications, security fixes, and new changes to the web platform:
- the
relattribute is now supported on forms - the Origin private file system access is now enabled by default. Now web applications can store and retrieve data from and to the filesystem in a sandbox.
Developers can now make use of CSS color functions color(), lab(), lch(), oklab(), and oklch() by enabling a settings flag. For more "under-the-hood" changes, you can check the release notes below.
Polypane
Polypane users, rejoice, for you got another update. This release brings new features to the Elements panel, better filters for the Networking panel, the color picker supports APCA, faster startup time, better UI performance, and much more.
WebKit
Safari users can now upgrade their browsers to version 16.4. This release brings a huge load of features, updates, improvements, and fixes. Here are just a few highlights:
- web apps added to the home screen on iOS and iPadOS 16.4 now have support for Web Push
- Web Components are easier to use due to Declarative Shadow DOM
- CSS
margin-trim, the new line height and root line height units (lhandrlh),font-size-adjust, and more - lazy loading for iframes
- AVIF support on macOS Monterey and macOS Big Sur
As I mentioned above, the list is a lot longer. Feel free to check the official release notes linked below.
By comparison, Safari Technology Preview 166 has a much shorter list of updates. Having @counter-style enabled by default, or adding support for the popover attribute, are just some of the features included here.
📡 The Release Radar
- BoxSlider v2.2.5 - A modern, lightweight content slider
- Discord.js 14.8.0 - A powerful JavaScript library for interacting with the Discord API
- Docusaurus v2.4.0 - Easy to maintain open source documentation websites
- DOCX 8.0 - generate and modify .docx files with JS/TS
- embetty v4.0.0 - display remote content like tweets or YouTube videos without compromising your privacy
- ESLint v8.36.0 - Find and fix problems in your JavaScript code
- Jasmine 4.6.0 - A JavaScript Testing Framework
- Marked v4.3.0 - A markdown parser and compiler
- melonJS 2 v15.0.0 - a fresh, modern & lightweight HTML5 game engine
- Mongoose 7 - MongoDB object modeling designed to work in an asynchronous environment
- Neutralinojs v4.11.0 - Portable and lightweight cross-platform desktop application development framework
- Node v19.8.0 (Current), Node v19.8.1 (Current), Node.js March 17th Infrastructure Incident Post-mortem - an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime
- Partytown v0.7.6 - run third-party scripts from a web worker
- Playwright v1.32.0 - a framework for Web Testing and Automation
- Puppeteer v19.8.0 - Headless Chrome Node.js API
- Qwik 0.23 - The HTML-first framework
- TypeScript 5.0 - a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output
- v8go v0.9.0 - Execute JavaScript from Go
🛠️ Front End Resources
- AI Tool Hunt - The Ultimate Directory for Discovering the Best AI Tools
- Extra thicc icon set - 300 high-quality vector icons
- fontpair - Free fonts and font pairings to use for your next design project
- Make Bookmarklets - Create and test bookmarklets in your browser
- Modern Font Stacks - System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS
- Shapes - Copy-Paste SVG Shapes
There's more where that came from. Explore the rest of the Front End Resource collection.
Wrapping things up
Ukraine is still suffering from the Russian invasion - if you are looking for ways to help, please check Smashing Magazine's article We All Are Ukraine 🇺🇦 or get in touch with your trusted charity.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, there are a couple of ways to support it:
- 📢 share the link to this issue on social media
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Each of these helpxs me out, and I would appreciate your consideration.
That's all I have for this issue. Have a great and productive week, keep yourselves safe, spend as much time as possible with your loved ones, and I will see you again next time!
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