Chrome 104-105, Edge 104-105, Firefox 103-104, Polypane 10, Safari 15.6, and more | Front End News #074

Chrome 104-105, Edge 104-105, Firefox 103-104, Polypane 10, Safari 15.6, and more | Front End News #074

NOTE: This is issue #074 of my newsletter, which went live on Monday, September 12th. 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.


Front End News is back after the summer break and there are many things to cover. All main browsers have received updates: Chrome 104-105, Edge 104-105, Firefox 103-104, Polypane 10, Safari 15.6, and Safari Technology Preview 150-152. The software updates and releases include Astro 1.0, Electron 20, TypeScript 4.8, and a lot more. And everything is sprinkled with a handful of useful resources.


Browser news

Rachel Andrew continues covering the new additions to the web platform. We got here the entries for July and August:

Chrome

Chrome 104 rolled out on August 2. Most of the new features are focused on developers, such as the level 4 of Media Queries, or the independent values for CSS Transform properties.

Chrome 105 was released on August 30. The highlights of this update are container queries and the :has() CSS property.

Edge

Microsoft Edge kept pace with its Chromium brethren and released versions 104 and 105. As usual, their release notes focus less on platform updates and more on Edge-specific features. A few examples are Client Certificate Switching, enhanced security policies for less visited sites, or the option to load Microsoft Office and Outlook in the sidebar.

Firefox

Firefox 103 became available on July 26. This version brought, among other things, improved performance on high-refresh rate monitors, better responsiveness on macOS, and support for the backdrop-filter, scroll-snap-stop, and :modal CSS properties.

Version 104 rolled out on August 23 and brought the option to analyze the power usage of a website and many security fixes and "under-the-hood" improvements.

Polypane

Polypane claims to be "the browser for ambitious developers" and the new version 10 delivers on this promise. The panel for dev tools can now be detached, you can disable the navigation sync, or you can choose the format of your screenshots. The list of changes is a lot longer and can be checked in the release notes below.

WebKit

The WebKit development team has worked hard lately to bring Safari on par with the other browsers. Safari 15.6 brings support for the :modal CSS pseudo-class and a long list of issues that have been fixed.

Last, but not least, we got no less than four releases for the Safari Technology Preview. If you want to know what will come in the future updates of Safari, you can give it a spin or simply check the release notes.


Software updates and releases


Front End Resources

  • Eggradients - Gradient background colors
  • Fabpic - Beautify your screenshots in just a few seconds
  • Heroicons - Beautiful hand-crafted SVG icons, by the makers of Tailwind CSS
  • Sublus - Mix & Match your Illustration needs
  • SVG Backgrounds - a collection of customizable SVG-based repeating patterns and backgrounds

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.

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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!