Monthly-ish learnings and discoveries related to frontend, the web, and software engineering in general.

• My AI skeptic friends are all nuts: As an AI-skeptic myself, this post gave me some food for thought. I played around with agent mode and Claude 4 in Zed the other day, and that much I can say already: it’s absolutely a different Hausnummer than Copilot clumsily autocompleting my code a few months ago.

• During WWDC, Apple announced a bunch of features coming to Safari 19 26. My personal favorites: anchor positioning, scroll-driven animations, and the URLPattern API. You can find the full list on the WebKit blog.

• VS Code now shows the baseline support status of CSS features. It is also getting an official PostgreSQL extension for building and exploring databases that integrates with Copilot.

• In the latest episode of React: Tag und Nacht, Remix, the popular React-framework that has recently been merged into React Router, “woke up” to be an entirely different framework based on a fork of Preact. The community is… not excited (Reddit, HN). My personal take: their stated principles sound promising, and I appreciate the experimentation. But I don’t trust the authors to keep this stable for long enough that it would be a good foundation for any project that intends to be around for a while. Thoughts?

• Last month I mentioned that Firefox has shipped the new Temporal API. If you haven’t heard about it before, here’s a good overview of what it does.

• Ever wondered why some types of collections support forEach but not other array methods such as map? That’s because they implement the iterator protocol, which so far hasn’t supported anything else. Fortunately, that has now changed: Iterator helpers have become Baseline Newly Available

• gum is a neat little tool if you write shell scripts but also want ✨fancy✨

• Invoker commands are a declarative way for showing popups, dialogs, and more. You can also register your own commands! This should make handling many common interactions in web UIs simpler. Chrome-only for now, but all other major browsers are actively working on implementing the spec.

• Inner peace 😌

Notable releases:

• Storybook 9.0, with huge improvements in bundle size and installed dependencies, along with better testing tools. They offer a migration tool that worked flawlessly for RIS UI. Here’s an interview with one of the engineers if you want to hear more.

• Angular 20 continues to modernize and improve the framework with signals, reworking their rendering model, improved template syntax, and more. I haven’t worked with Angular in years, but it looks like they’re busy fixing all the things I didn’t like about it back then. Definitely keeping an eye on it!

• You can now try Rolldown Vite, the next generation of Vite with a completely rewritten bundler.

• es-toolkit, a popular alternative to lodash, is now 100% lodash compatible.

• JSPM 4.0, a different take on package management for the frontend that builds on web standards. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m intrigued.