#1 Frontendies launch, container queries, and year wrap-ups

Hello 👋🏼 frontendies! It's happening - the first issue of the monthly frontend newsletter ever! I'm incredibly excited and nervous simultaneously, but I can't wait for what the next months will bring. There are very few of you at this point, but I'm very grateful for all the support you gave me ❤️ Now, let's get back to business.

January was a mixed bag. Lots of yearly reviews, State of JS 2022, some major releases managed to be wrapped up, a couple of beautiful redesigns, lots of good articles on various topics, a bazillion AI-related things, and most importantly, CONTAINER QUERIES! Happy reading, frontendies, and see you next month!"

Firefox v110 beta with container queries was officially released on 01/17/2023, making it fully supported across the big four browsers! The stable version is going out next month, but we can finally start using them in new projects. Happy coding!

Astro just released their second major version full of new features, including Content collections, hybrid rendering, redesigned error overlays, an improved development server, Vite 4.0, and a new public roadmap. Check out their release announcement blog post for more details. I almost forgot that the Astro team also released a GPT-3 based documentation assistant, HoustonAI... well, I'll leave it at that.

evervault.com jumped on the Linear train, and it looks remarkable. Dive into all the tiny details or try to recreate some of them. It is undoubtedly a beautiful piece, but while the Lighthouse score is quite good on desktop... mobile, not so much. I also wish they spent more time on accessibility 😬

GitHub introduced a copilot tests generator... it is impressive how far AI got in the last year or two, and even though it doesn't seem like we'll need to look for other jobs anytime soon, it has potential to make some repetitive tasks much more straightforward. Does this mean we don't have to write tests anymore?! I wouldn't be so optimistic, but we can still dream.

Syntax FM with their yearly predictions yet again! Lots of topics, and it is hard not to agree with Wes and Scot. Selected few: SSR JS sites, Deno gets hotter, New JS APIs, Rust becomes more Popular, CSS Subgrid.

Next-generation CSS parser, transformer, bundler, and minifier, written in Rust for the best performance. Lots of promising stats and statements. It's interesting to see some postcss competitors, especially performant ones. This might shape up to be the Vite for CSS (btw, it has a Vite plugin!).

Vivid is a fascinating tool to change (and speed up) your development process. Is it the Tailwind WYSIWYG editor that we've been looking for? No clue 🤷‍♂️. The concept is interesting for sure! With the recent addition of AI, it has a chance to get on the GPT-3 hype train, which is very exciting!

One of the most significant annual surveys for our industry, with over 39k responses, covering topics like wages, platform features, libraries, tools, opinions, and more. If you haven't participated in it yet, I recommend doing it at the end of this year. Either way, check out the results for 2022 and verify/challenge your assumptions.

I'm not going to lie, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are still new to me. My basic understanding is that they allow multiple concurrent connections which results in better performance. Guess what? There is much more to it than that. Robin Max dives deep into resource prioritization and intricate differences between vendor implementations. This article was published at the end of 2022, but it's one that you want to consider, especially if you're into web performance.

SVGs are powerful, but at the same time, there are so many gotchas 😔 In this quick read, Mariana Beldi tries to save us from some of them. You can find information and tricks about view-box, width and height, fill and stroke, missing IDs, clipping and masking, and namespaces.