Better Web Vitals with Lighthouse, why is Babel running out of money, Web Almanac needs authors, and presenting CanIEmail | Front End News #029
NOTE: This is issue #029 of my newsletter, which went live on Monday, May 17th. 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.
Addy Osmani is showing us how to get the best of Lighthouse to optimize for the Web Vitals. The Babel team is showing us a glimpse of how open-source software is financed and what challenges they are facing. The Web Almanac needs authors and contributors. And I'm presenting CanIEmail, a great tool to find what features each email client supports. We also have some major software releases with Angular 12, Deno 1.10, TypeScript 4.3 RC, and more.
Optimizing Web Vitals using Lighthouse
I've mentioned a lot of content related to Web Vitals recently. And there's a good reason for that, as Google plans to start using these metrics in their search ranking algorithm.
So today I'm bringing you an official guide, written by the man, Addy Osmani, himself. It covers useful topics, like how to measure the Web Vitals, how to identify what can be improved, and even how to improve the performance of third-party dependencies.
Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
Financing open-source development has long been a debated topic. The Babel team is disclosing what happens behind the scenes for one of the most used pieces of software.
Web Almanac needs authors
The Web Almanac still needs authors (and other contributors) for some of the planned chapters: localization, CMS, privacy, and a few more. This can be your chance to contribute to open-source software by creating content.
CanIEmail
CanIEmail is a website inspired by CanIUse.com. Like its counterpart, it highlights the support for various features in the email clients used today or in the past. I'm talking about HTML tags and attributes, CSS properties, and image formats.
Browser news
Polypane
Polypane is 2-years old, and it celebrates this anniversary with the update to version 6. It features Chromium 91, an overview for the Web Vitals, simulation for astigmatism, and many bug fixes and improvements.
Software updates and Releases
- Angular v12 - a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications
- Bootstrap Icons v1.5.0 - Official open source SVG icon library for Bootstrap
- Cypress v7.3.0 - Fast, easy and reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser
- Deno 1.10 - A secure JavaScript and TypeScript runtime
- Docusaurus 2 Beta - Easy to maintain open source documentation websites
- postcss-loader v4.3.0 - PostCSS loader for webpack
- react-bootstrap v1.6.0 - Bootstrap components built with React
- TypeScript 4.3 RC
Wrapping things up
Have a great and productive week, keep yourselves safe, and I will see you next time!