Tech News - Web Development

Yesterday, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 66. In this release, the Firefox team aimed to reduce the online annoyances users face by introducing features like Block Autoplay, scroll anchoring, and more. Key features Firefox 66 is packed with: Block Autoplay Often, when we visit a website for some research or reading an article, it all of a sudden starts playing a video or audio, which is quite distracting. In this release, Firefox prevents websites from playing audio and video automatically by default with a newly-added feature, Block Autoplay. If you have already visited a website and clicked on the play button of a video, Firefox will remember your preference and automatically play videos in the subsequent visits. You can also enable autoplay on your favorite website by adding them to your permission list. For this, you just need to visit the control center by clicking the “i” with a circle on the address bar. Then go to Permissions and select the “allow” option in the drop-down menu. Source: Mozilla Scroll anchoring The text part of a web page loads faster as compared to the images and ads. So, as you are reading the article, these slow-loading ads and images move the text around. Scroll anchoring solves this problem, by remembering where you are so that you are not interrupted by these slow-loading images or ads. Improved search experience If you are someone who opens everything in a new tab and ends up with 20 open tabs, like me, this new feature in Firefox 66 is a savior for you. This version allows you to search tabs from the tab overflow menu, which appears when you have a large number of tabs open in a window. Additionally, Firefox 66 comes with a redesigned new tab for private browsing. Now, when you open a new tab in private browsing, it will show a search bar with your default search engine. To set your default search engine, go to Preferences, Search, then select Default Search Engine. Read the official announcement, to know about other exciting features Firefox 66 comes with. Mozilla’s Firefox Send is now publicly available as an encrypted file sharing service Mozilla Firefox will soon support ‘letterboxing’, an anti-fingerprinting technique of the Tor Browser Mozilla releases Firefox 65 with support for AV1, enhanced tracking protection, and more!

On Tuesday, Brendan Colloran, a data scientist at Mozilla, introduced an experimental tool called Iodide. This tool allows data scientists to create interactive documents using web technologies. As the tool is currently in alpha stage, it is not recommended to use it for critical work. Why Iodide is needed? Data scientists not only need to write code and analyze data, as a part of their job, they also have to share results and insights with the decision making teams. While they have a wide range of tools for analyzing the data like Jupyter Notebook and RStudio, there are a very few options for sharing the results in an effective way using web technologies. Often times, data scientists just copy the key figures and summary statistics to a Google Doc. Iodide aims to eliminate the round trips between exploring data in code and creating an understandable report. It also aims to make collaboration among data scientist very convenient. When a data scientist is reading another’s final report and wants to look at the code behind it, he can easily do so. How does Iodide work? Iodide provides a “explore view”, which consists of a set of panes. These include an editor for writing code, a console for viewing the output from code, and a workspace viewer for examining the variables you’ve created. In addition to these, it also has a “report preview” pane which shows the preview of your report. Source: Mozilla When you click on the REPORT button, the contents of your report preview will expand to fill the entire window. This is very useful for the readers who are not interested in the technical details as it will hide the code. Source: Mozilla Once the report is ready, users can send a link directly to their colleagues and collaborators. This will give them access to the clean and readable document as well as the underlying code and the editing environment. So, in case, they want to review your code, they can switch to the “explore mode”. If they want to use your code for their own work, they can fork it and start working on their own version, similar to the GitHub fork option. To know more in detail, check the blog post shared by Mozilla. Mozilla’s Firefox Send is now publicly available as an encrypted file sharing service Mozilla Firefox will soon support ‘letterboxing’, an anti-fingerprinting technique of the Tor Browser Mozilla shares key takeaways from the Design Tools survey

Last year in October, the Node.js and JS Foundations announced their intent to create a joint organization. After six months of analyzing community feedback, deliberation, and collaboration, the two foundations finally merged into the OpenJS Foundation on Tuesday. https://twitter.com/nodejs/status/1105500455864598528 Dave Methvin, Technical Advisory Committee Chair, JS Foundation, explaining the motivation behind this merger said in the announcement, “This is an exciting step forward for the entire open source JavaScript community, as it strengthens the impact of our collective efforts under one united Foundation. A new merged Foundation is able to better serve the community and members to grow the JavaScript ecosystem from a technology and standards perspective.” The OpenJS Foundation is backed by 30 corporate and end-user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, and GoDaddy. It currently hosts a wide range of projects including Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Node.js, webpack, and many more. Goals of the OpenJS Foundation Providing resources and accelerating the development The OpenJS Foundation is responsible for expanding the JavaScript community and accelerating the development of JavaScript and other key ecosystem projects. It will provide financial and marketing resources to support projects and working groups. It will act as one stop for all projects within the open JavaScript community for fulfilling their infrastructure, technical, and marketing needs. Combined governance structure The merger will provide a combined governance structure to enable all projects, regardless of their sizes, to benefit from experienced mentors as they progress through the project life cycle. It will encourage collaboration across the JavaScript ecosystem and affiliated standard bodies to create a single home for any project in the JavaScript ecosystem. Improved membership experience The OpenJS Foundation brings together the goals of both the JavaScript and Node.js foundations, so companies or organizations that want to support JavaScript will no longer have to choose between the two. This will also eliminate the operational redundancies between the two organizations and streamline the experience for member companies that provide financial support. Additionally, it will provide a single point of entry to new and prospective members for getting involved in open source JavaScript project and create a simpler and more engaging experience for them. Many Twitter users were excited about this announcement and believe that this a major step towards the overall growth of the JavaScript open source ecosystem. https://twitter.com/gauravseth/status/1105888912608681984 https://twitter.com/agoric/status/1105534569992806400 To know more in detail, check out the official announcement. Node.js and JS Foundation announce intent to merge; developers have mixed feelings Node.js announces security updates for all their active release lines for August 2018 Why use JavaScript for machine learning?  

Yesterday, Google released version 73 of its popular web browser. Chrome 73 comes with support for PWAs for MacOS, signed HTTP exchanges for creating portable content, and constructable style sheets. DuckDuckGo now a default search engine Interestingly, Chrome 73 comes with a feature to change its default search engine to a to DuckDuckGo which is a more privacy-friendly option. Google acknowledges that it updated the available search engines based on "new usage statistics" from "recently collected data." DuckDuckGo is the preferred search option in more than 60 markets including the United States and the United Kingdom. Mac OS related updates Chrome 73 adds support for bringing Progressive Web Apps to Mac OS bringing PWAs to all desktop platforms - Mac, Windows, Chrome OS and Linux. Chrome 73 also includes the long-awaited dark mode for macOS. Dark mode was first announced for Chrome last month, but yesterday’s release has made it official. Signed HTTP Exchanges Chrome 73 comes with Signed HTTP Exchanges (SGX) which makes it “possible to create “portable” content that can be delivered by other parties, and this is the key aspect, it retains the integrity and attribution of the original site.” SGX is a part of Web Packages. Signed HTTP exchanges enables faster content delivery for users, making it possible to get the benefits of a CDN without having to cede control of your certificate’s private key. Check out Kinuko’s Signed HTTP Exchanges post for details on how to get started. Constructable style sheets Chrome 73 users can now create and distribute reusable styles using Constructable Stylesheets. Constructable Stylesheets make it possible to define and prepare shared CSS styles, and then apply those styles to multiple Shadow Roots or the Document easily and without duplication. To get started, you can create a new instance of CSSStyleSheet, then use either replace or replaceSync to update the stylesheet rules. Other updates There is a new regular expression called matchAll(). It is a matching method on the string prototype, and returns an array containing the complete matches. The <link> element now supports imagesrcset and imagesizes properties to correspond to srcsetand sizes attributes of HTMLImageElement. Blink's shadow blur radius implementation, now matches Firefox and Safari. These are just a select few updates. For more details, visit the Google’s developer blog. Chrome announces KV Storage, the first built-in module for Web You can now publish PWAs in the Google Play Store as Chrome 72 for Android ships with Trust Web Activity feature. Google releases a fix for the zero day vulnerability in its Chrome browser while it was under active attack.

Google Chrome announced details regarding an experimental new ‘built-in modules’ feature, called, KV Storage, yesterday. KV Storage is the first asynchronous key/value storage module, shipped by Chrome. Built-in modules are very similar to regular JavaScript modules except that they don’t need to be downloaded--since they’re shipped with the browser. Built-in modules need to go through a standardization process where each of the modules has their own specification requiring a design review and positive signs of support. Users can import a built-in module using a prefix ‘std:’ followed by the built-in module's identifier. KV Storage module is quite simple and similar to the localStorage API. However, instead of getItem(), setItem(), and removeItem(), it consists of get(), set(), and delete(). It also includes different map-like methods that are not available to localStorage such as keys(), values(), and entries(). Also, similar to a Map, its keys are not strings. However, unlike Map, all the KV Storage methods return either promises or async iterators. Other than that, the KV Storage module has two named exports: storage and StorageArea. Storage is an instance of the StorageArea class consisting of the name 'default', and this is what developers use most often as a part of their application code. For the StorageArea class, additional isolation is needed. Also, StorageArea data gets stored in an IndexedDB database with the name kv-storage:${name}. Moreover, you don’t have to wait to use KV storage in your code until all browsers support it. This is because Chrome is currently working on another feature called import maps that lets you use built-in modules as soon as even one browser supports them. Import maps refer to a mechanism that allows developers to alias import identifiers to one or more alternate identifiers. This is quite efficient as it allows users to resolve a particular import identifier across your entire application. However, for cases where the browsers don't support modules at all, you have to use import statements, to conditionally load the built-in modules. This also means that you’d have to use module scripts, i.e. <script type="module">. For more information, check out the official Google blog post. Google releases a fix for the zero day vulnerability in its Chrome browser while it was under active attack Google Chrome developers “clarify” the speculations around Manifest V3 after a study nullifies their performance hit argument Chrome 72 Beta releases with public class fields, user activation, and more

Yesterday Mozilla announced Firefox Send to be publicly available, which initially was a “Test Pilot” experiment. Firefox Send is a free file sharing service that allows users to easily and securely share files with end-to-end encryption from any browser. By the end of this week, a beta version of its Android app will also be available to the users. How does Firefox Send work? Firefox Send is intended to be an alternative to email, where larger file attachments are not supported. Users do have cloud storage options like Google Drive and Dropbox, but these can be time-consuming in cases where we just need to share a single file for a limited amount of time. You can use the service by visiting the Firefox Send website, upload your file, and set an expiration period. Additionally, it also provides users an option to password protect their files before sending. You will then get a link that you can share with a recipient. Check out the following video to know how exactly it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRHpEn2eHJA Firefox Send comes with various features and advantages Firefox Send maintains the security of your files by providing end-to-end encryption from the moment a file is sent until it is opened. With Firefox Send, you can share files of size up to 1 GB. If you want to share files of size up to 2.5 GB you need to sign up for a free Firefox account. For the file recipients, it is not compulsory to have a Firefox account to access the shared file. They just need to simply click on the received link and download the file. It puts control in the hands of a user by allowing them to choose when a file link gets expired, the number of times their file can be downloaded, and also allows adding an optional password. These features come in handy when you want to give the recipient only one-time or limited access to your files and hence ensures that your information is not available online indefinitely. To know more about Firefox Send, check out the Mozilla official announcement. Mozilla Firefox will soon support ‘letterboxing’, an anti-fingerprinting technique of the Tor Browser Mozilla engineer shares the implications of rewriting browser internals in Rust Common Voice: Mozilla’s largest voice dataset with approx 1400 hours of voice clips in 18 different languages  

After releasing the RC0 version of React Native 0.59, the team announced its stable release yesterday. This release comes with some of the most awaited features including React Hooks, updated JavaScriptCore, and more. Support for React Hooks React Hooks were introduced to solve a wide variety of problems in React. It enables you to reuse stateful logic across components without having to restructure your components hierarchy. With React Hooks, you can split a component into smaller functions, based on what pieces are related rather than forcing a split based on lifecycle methods. It also lets you use more of React’s features without classes. Updated JavaScriptCore The JavaScriptCore (JSC) is an engine that allows Android developers to use JavaScript natively in their apps. React Native 0.59 comes with an updated JSC for Android, and hence supports a lot of modern JavaScript features. These features include 64-bit support, JavaScript support, and big performance improvements. Improved app startup time with inline requires Applications now load resources as and when required to prevent slowing down the app launch. This feature is known as “inline requires”, which delay the requiring of a module or file until that module or file is actually needed. Using inline requires can result in startup time improvements. CLI improvements Earlier, React Native CLI improvements had long-standing issues and lacked official support. The CLI tools are now moved to a new repository and come with exciting improvements. Now, logs are formatted better and commands run almost instantly. Breaking changes React Native 0.59 has been cleaned up following Google's latest recommendations, which could result in potential breakage of existing apps. You might experience a runtime crash and see a message like this, “You need to use a Theme.AppCompat theme (or descendant) with this activity." Developers are recommended to update their project’s AndroidManifest.xml file to make sure that “android:theme” value is an AppCompat theme. Also, in this release, the “react-native-git-upgrade” command has been replaced with the newly improved “react-native upgrade” command. To read the official announcement, check out React Native’s website. React Native community announce March updates, post sharing the roadmap for Q4 React Native Vs Ionic: Which one is the better mobile app development framework? How to create a native mobile app with React Native [Tutorial]

Yesterday, F5 Networks, the company that offers businesses cloud and security application services, announced that it is set to acquire NGNIX, the company behind the popular open-source web server software, for approximately $670 million. These two companies are coming together to provide their customers with consistent application services across every environment. F5 has been seeing some stall in its growth lately given that its last quarterly earnings have only shown a 4% growth compared to the year before. On the other hand, NGINX continues to show a 100 percent year-on-year growth since 2014. The company currently boasts of 375 million users with about 1,500 customers for its paid services like support, load balancing, and API gateway and analytics. This acquisition will enable F5 to accelerate  ‘time to market’ of its services to customers for building modern applications. F5 plans to enhance the current offerings by NGINX using its security solutions and will also be integrating its cloud-native innovations with NGINX’s load balancing technology. Along with these advancements, F5 will help scale NGINX selling opportunities using its global sales force, channel infrastructure, and partner ecosystem. François Locoh-Donou, President and CEO of F5, sharing his vision behind acquiring NGINX said, “F5’s acquisition of NGINX strengthens our growth trajectory by accelerating our software and multi-cloud transformation”. He adds, “By bringing F5’s world-class application security and rich application services portfolio for improving performance, availability, and management together with NGINX’s leading software application delivery and API management solutions, unparalleled credibility and brand recognition in the DevOps community, and massive open source user base, we bridge the divide between NetOps and DevOps with consistent application services across an enterprise’s multi-cloud environment.” NGINX’s open source community was also a major factor behind this acquisition. F5 will continue investing in the NGINX open source project as open source is a core part of its multi-cloud strategy. F5 expects that this will help it accelerate product integrations with leading open source projects and open doors for more partnership opportunities. Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, Inc, said, “NGINX and F5 share the same mission and vision. We both believe applications are at the heart of driving digital transformation. And we both believe that an end-to-end application infrastructure—one that spans from code to customer—is needed to deliver apps across a multi-cloud environment.” The acquisition is now approved by the boards of directors of both F5 and NGINX and is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2019. Once the acquisition is complete, the NGINX founders, Gus Robertson, Igor Sysgoev, and Maxim Konovalov will be joining F5 Networks. To know more in detail, check out the announcement by F5 Networks. Now you can run nginx on Wasmjit on all POSIX systems Security issues in nginx HTTP/2 implementation expose nginx servers to DoS attack Security issues in nginx HTTP/2 implementation expose nginx servers to DoS attack  

In a meeting conducted last month, the CSS Working Group has agreed on introducing a few trigonometry functions in CSS. Created in 1997 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the CSS Working Group is responsible for discussing new features and tackling issues in CSS. Currently, they have approved the following 10 functions: Sine: sin() Cosine: cos() Tangent: tan() Arccosine: acos() Arcsine: asin() Arctangent: atan() Arctangent of two numbers x and y: atan2() Square root: sqrt() Square root of the sum of squares of its arguments: hypot() Power of: pow() CSS is no longer just limited to changing colors or fonts. Developers have been slowly relying on CSS for implementing much more complex tasks. CSS 3, its overhauled version, comes with several web animations, gradients, certain selectors, and more. However, CSS lacked the ability to work with angles and perform much more advanced mathematical operations than adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing two values. This decision comes after multiple requests by web developers to introduce trigonometric functions for simplifying implementations of many use cases that involve angles. These will be very handy in cases like syncing rotation angles, converting between angles and x/y dimensions, and more. Currently, for implementing these use cases developers had to either hardcode, use JavaScript, or a preprocessor, which is a pain. Explaining the need of trigonometric functions in CSS, one of the developers said, “In static markup, the solution is to hard-code approximate values, but that often leaves pixel gaps or discontinuities from rounding errors. In dynamic situations, as others have mentioned, the only solution is JavaScript (with lots of converting back and forth between radians for the JS functions and degrees or turns for my design and for SVG properties, which is the only time I usually need Math.PI!).” Developers are also requesting for reciprocal functions for calculating cotangent, secant, and cosecant. These will be very convenient but are currently not a priority. Read the discussion by CSS Working Group, check out its GitHub repository. Erlang turns 20: Tracing the journey from Ericsson to Whatsapp How you can replace a hot path in JavaScript with WebAssembly Bootstrap 5 to replace jQuery with vanilla JavaScript

Back in January this year, Reuters in an investigative piece shared that DarkMatter was providing staff for a secret hacking operation called Project Raven. After reading this report, Mozilla is now thinking whether it should block DarkMatter from serving as one of its internet security providers. The unit working for Project Raven were mostly former US intelligence officials, who were allegedly conducting privacy-threatening operations for the UAE government. The team behind this project was working in a converted mansion in Abu Dhabi, which they called “the Villa”.  These operations included hacking accounts of human rights activists, journalists, and officials from rival governments. On February 25, DarkMatter in a letter addressed to Mozilla, CEO Karim Sabbagh denied all the allegations reported by Reuters and refused that it has anything to do with Project Raven. Sabbagh wrote in the letter, “We have never, nor will we ever, operate or manage non-defensive cyber activities against any nationality.” Mozilla’s response to the Reuter report In an interview last week, Mozilla executive said that Reuter’s report has raised concerns inside the company about DarkMatter misusing its authority to certify websites as safe. Mozilla is yet to decide whether they should deny DarkMatter from this authority. Selena Deckelmann, a senior director of engineering for Mozilla, “We don’t currently have technical evidence of misuse (by DarkMatter) but the reporting is strong evidence that misuse is likely to occur in the future if it hasn’t already.” Deckelmann further shared that Mozilla is also concerned about the certifications DarkMatter has granted and may strip some or all of the 400 certifications that DarkMatter has granted to websites under a limited authority since 2017. Marshall Erwin, director of trust and security for Mozilla, said that DarkMatter could use its authority for “offensive cybersecurity purposes rather than the intended purpose of creating a more secure, trusted web.” A website is designated as secure if it is certified by an external authorized organization called Certification Authority (CA). This certifying organization is also responsible for securing the connection between an approved website and its users. To get this authority, these organizations need to apply to individual browser makers like Mozilla and Apple. DarkMatter has been threatening Mozilla to gain full authority to grant certifications since 2017. Giving it a full authority will allow them to issue certificates to hackers impersonating real websites, including banks. https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1103596200891244545 To know more about this news in detail, read the full story at Reuters’ official website. Mozilla Firefox will soon support ‘letterboxing’, an anti-fingerprinting technique of the Tor Broswer Mozilla engineer shares the implications of rewriting browser internals in Rust Mozilla shares key takeaways from the Design Tools survey

Yesterday, ZDNet shared that Mozilla will be adding a new anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing to Firefox 67, which is set to release in May this year. Letterboxing is part of the Tor Uplift project that started back in 2016 and is currently available for Firefox Nightly users. As part of the Tor Uplift project, the team is slowing bringing the privacy-focused features of Tor Browser to Firefox. For instance, Firefox 55 came with support for a Tor Browser feature called First-Party Isolation (FPI). This feature prevented ad trackers from using cookies to track user activity by separating cookies on a per-domain basis. What is letterboxing and why it is needed? The dimensions of a browser window can act as a big source of finger-printable data that can be used by advertising networks. These advertising networks can use browser window sizes to create user profiles and track users as they resize their browser and move across new URLs and browser tabs. To maintain online privacy of users, it is important to protect this window dimension data continuously even if users resize or maximize their window or enter fullscreen. What letterboxing does is that it masks the real dimensions of the browser window while keeping the window width and height dimensions multiples of 200px and 100px during the resize operation. And, then it adds a gray space at the top, bottom, left, or right of the current page. The advertising code tracking the window resize events reads the flawed dimensions and sends it to its server, and only then Firefox removes the gray spaces. This is how the advertising code is tricked into reading the incorrect window dimensions. Here is a demo of letterboxing showing how exactly it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=TQxuuFTgz7M The letterboxing feature is not enabled by default. To enable the feature, you can go to the ‘about:config’ page in the browser, enter “privacy.resistFingerprinting" in the search box, and toggle the browser's anti-fingerprinting features to "true." To know more in detail about letterboxing, check out ZDNet’s website. Mozilla engineer shares the implications of rewriting browser internals in Rust Mozilla shares key takeaways from the Design Tools survey Mozilla partners with Ubisoft to Clever-Commit its code, an artificial intelligence assisted assistant

The GitHub team released a new Go library, Vulcanizer, that interacts with an Elasticsearch cluster, yesterday. Vulcanizer is not a full-fledged Elasticsearch client. However, it is aimed at providing a high-level API to help with common tasks associated with operating an Elasticsearch cluster. These tasks include querying health status of the cluster, migrating data from nodes, updating cluster settings, and more. GitHub makes use of Elasticsearch as the core technology behind its search services. GitHub has already released the Elastomer library for Ruby and they use Elastic library for Go by user olivere. However, the GitHub team wanted a high-level API that corresponded with the common operations on cluster such as disabling allocation or draining the shards from a node. They wanted a library that focused more on the administrative operations and that could be easily used by their existing tooling. Since Go’s structure encourages the construction of composable software, they decided it was a good fit for Elasticsearch. This is because, Elasticsearch is very effective and helps carry out almost all the operations that can be done using its HTTP interface, and where you don’t want to write JSON manually. Vulcanizer is great at getting nodes of a cluster, updating the max recovery cluster settings, and safely adding or removing the nodes from the exclude settings, making sure that shards don’t unexpectedly allocate onto a node. Also, Vulcanizer helps build ChatOps tooling around Elasticsearch quickly for common tasks. GitHub team states that having all the Elasticsearch functionality in their own library, Vulcanizer, helps its internal apps to be slim and isolated. For more information, check out the official GitHub Vulcanizer post. GitHub increases its reward payout model for its bug bounty program   GitHub launches draft pull requests GitHub Octoverse: top machine learning packages, languages, and projects of 2018

Last week, the team behind the Dojo Toolkit announced the release of Dojo 5.0. This release comes with extended support for TypeScript versions from 2.6.x to 3.2.x, condition polyfills, better Build Time Rendering, and more. Dojo is a JavaScript toolkit that equips developers with everything they need to build a web app like language utilities, UI components, and more. New features and enhancements in Dojo 5.0 Conditional polyfills This release provides a better user experience by introducing an out-of-the-box solution for building and loading polyfills in Dojo applications. A polyfill is a piece of code, which implements a feature that web browsers do not support natively. The Dojo build will produce two platform bundles that will be loaded only if two key conditions are fulfilled. First, the shim module is imported somewhere in an application. Second, a user browser does not natively support the browser feature. This update means serving less JavaScript and hence improving the application performance without compromising on features. Better Build Time Rendering (BTR) This version comes with various stability and feature enhancements in BTR such as Dojo Blocks, support for StateHistory API, multiple page HTML generation, better error messaging, and more. BTR was supported in Dojo via the Dojo cli-build-app command since its initial 2.0.0 release. It provides rendering an application to HTML during the build and in-lines the critical CSS enabling the application to effectively render static HTML pages. It also comes with some advantages of server-side rendering (SSR) such as performance and SEO and eliminates the complexities of running a server to support full SSR. Dojo Blocks Dojo Blocks is a new mechanism that allows you to execute code in Node.js as part of the build. A Dojo Block module can do things like reading a group of markdown files, transforming them into VNodes, and making them available to render in the application, all at build time. The results of this Dojo module can be written to the cache that can be used at runtime in the browser. Simplifying testing with Assertion Templates Dojo 5.0 comes with Assertion Templates, that makes testing widgets easier. Earlier, developers had to manually curate each ‘expectedRender’ result per test. Assertion Templates solves this problem by allowing developers to easily modify and layer outputs for the expected render. To read the entire list of updates in Dojo 5.0, check out the official announcement. Dojo 4.0 released with support for Progressive Web Apps, a redesigned Virtual DOM, and more! npm at Node+JS Interactive 2018: npm 6, the rise and fall of JavaScript frameworks, and more Mozilla optimizes calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly in Firefox, making it almost as fast as JS to JS calls  

Yesterday, the team behind Preact, a fast and smaller alternative of React, announced that Preact X is now in alpha. Preact X is the next major release, which includes some of the in-demand features of React like Fragments, Hooks, componentDidCatch, and createContext. https://twitter.com/preactjs/status/1102726702860517376 Following are some of the updates Preact X alpha comes with: Support for fragments Preact X alpha supports fragments, which is the major feature in this release. Fragments allow you to group a list of children without adding extra nodes to the DOM. Developers can now return an array of children from a component’s render method, without having to wrap them in a DOM element. The componentDidCatch lifecycle method This release comes with the componentDidCatch lifecycle method for better error handling. To make a class component an error boundary, developers just need to define the componentDidCatch(error, info) method. This method was introduced in React 16 to prevent a single JavaScript error in the UI from breaking the whole app. This method works using a concept called error boundary. An error boundary is a component that is responsible for catching JavaScript errors in their child component tree. It also logs the error and displays a fallback UI instead of the component tree that crashed. Hooks Preact X alpha supports hooks, which are functions that allow you to “hook into” or use React state and other lifecycle features via function components. You can import hooks in Preact using preact/hooks. The createContext API The createContext API, as the name suggests, creates a Context object. If a component is rendered that subscribes to this Context object, it will read the current context value from the closest matching provider above it in the tree. The Preact team calls it a successor for getChildContext, which is fine when you are certain that the value will not change. The creatContext API is a true pub/sub solution that allows you to deliver updates deep down the tree. Devtools Adapter In order to support the recent updates in react-devtools extension, the team has rewritten Preact’s devtools adapter from scratch, which can now directly hook into the renderer.  This also makes feature development much straightforward for the team. Along with these excellent updates, this version also comes with a few breaking changes. The most noticeable one is that pros.children is not guaranteed to be an array anymore. This update is made to support rendering components that return an array of children without wrapping them in a root node. Check out Preact’s GitHub repo to read the entire list of updates in Preact X alpha. React Native 0.59 RC0 is now out with React Hooks, and more Getting started with React Hooks by building a counter with useState and useEffect React 16.8 releases with the stable implementation of Hooks

The GNOME team released beta version 3.32 of GNOME, a free and open source GUI for the Linux computer operating system, last month. GNOME 3.32 is set to release on 13th March 2019. Now, the GNOME team has also added the much-awaited support for fractional scaling to the GNOME 3.32, reports Phoronix. The GNOME 3.32 beta release explored major improvements, bug fixes, and other changes. Earlier GNOME would allow the users to scale windows by integral factors (typically 2). But this was very limiting as there are many systems between the dpi ranges that are effective for scale factor 2, or unscaled. In order to improve this, GNOME then allowed its users to scale by fractional values, e.g. 3/2, or 2/1.3333. This, in turn, allows its users more control over the UI scaling as opposed to the previous integer based scaling of 2, 3, etc. The newly added support for Fractional Scaling in the upcoming GNOME version 3.32 will help enhance the user experience with the modern HiDPI displays. The GNOME Shell changes along with the Mutter changes have also been merged ahead of GNOME version 3.32.0. GNOME version 3.32 says goodbye to application menus Fedora 29 beta brings Modularity, GNOME 3.30 support and other changes GNOME 3.30 released with improved Desktop performance, Screen Sharing, and more