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🚀 Frontend Focus

#​721 — December 10, 2025 | Read on the web

CSS Wrapped 2025 — Here’s a fun recap of the new tools and features added to the web platform this year, including CSS Carousels, customizable selects, scroll state queries and more. There’s a rather whimsical video running through the highlights too.

Chrome DevRel

A Secure, Customizable Form UI for Your JavaScript App — Create branded, dynamic forms with SurveyJS Creator and render them directly in your app. Populate fields with existing data from your DB and collect new inputs in a clean, form-based UI. A flexible form library for patient forms, applications, and more — with full data control and easy PDF export.

SurveyJS sponsor

Making Complex Web Apps Faster — An early-stage proposal for a new ‘Delayed Message Timing API’ to help deal with the slowdowns that multiple parallel contexts (iframes, threads, multiple windows, etc) can introduce. Feedback is being sought.

Joone Hur & Patrick Brosset

Did You Know Your Browser Has Two Accessibility Trees? — A technical deep dive into Chrome’s dual accessibility architecture, tracing the lifecycle of an event, DOM changes, eventual output, and more.

Max Design

⚡️ IN BRIEF

  • 🏆 The AV1 video codec has won an Emmy for "its impact on how the world delivers video content".

  • 🔐 Let's Encrypt has now been with us for a decade. This post tracks the growth over the past ten years — they're now close to protecting one billion web sites.

  • 🐶 Search engine Kagi has released v1.0 of its browser: Orion — interestingly it's built on the WebKit rendering engine, not the ubiquitous Chromium.

  • 👁️ The W3C with a little PSA: No ARIA is better than bad ARIA.

  • 🔎 Google shared its 'Year in Search', if you fancy recapping the trends of 2025.

  • 🛍️ Still looking for a Christmas gift? The Internet Archive has some merch.

📙 Articles, Opinions & Tutorials

How Fast Can Browsers Process Base64 Data? — It's on the order of gigabytes per second on modern hardware in most cases, except for Firefox (which has some optimizations coming soon) and Servo.

Daniel Lemire

Accessible by Design: The Role of the lang Attribute — On the importance of including the language attribute in your code — “a tiny line of code that provides universal access to your content”.

Todd Libby

How CERN Handles Millions of Time-Series Signals Effortlessly — CERN generates millions of signals daily—TimescaleDB boosts writes, compresses data, and accelerates queries for operators.

Tiger Data sponsor

The Anatomy of a Web Performance Report — Edwin shares a high-level overview of performance reports, explaining the typical sections you’ll see, why you’re seeing them, and what decisions they enable.

Edwin Molina Hernández

I Failed to Recreate the 1996 Space Jam Website with Claude — The tale of attempting to prompt a popular AI tool to recreate what many consider to be a monument to late 90s web design. “Some things are just irreproducibly perfect.

Jonah Glover

NoLoJS: Reducing the JS Workload with HTML and CSS — Thanks to various new features and functions in our combined HTML & CSS tool belt we now “need to consider replacing some ‘standard’ JS patterns with new methods that require no, or lo, JS”.

Aaron T. Grogg

The 'F*** Off' Contact Page — When a contact page, frustratingly, wants to encourage a user to do anything but actually reach out.

Nic Chan

Controlling Dialogs and Popovers with the Invoker Commands API
Aubrey Sambor

That Time I Tried Explaining HTML and CSS to My 5-Year Old Niece
Kevine Nzapdi

Non-Blocking Cross-Browser Image Rendering on the Canvas
Alexander Myshov

🧰 Tools, Code & Resources

Browser Score: Test How Much Your Browser Supports Web Platform Features — Formerly called CSS3 Test, this has some useful filters like the ability to view only CSS properties or selectors. You can also choose whether to include/exclude experimental, stable, or legacy features.

Lea Verou

MACROSCOPE - Ship Fewer Bugs, Merge Faster — Macroscope code review has the #1 signal-to-noise ratio on the market. Use MACROFOCUS for 50% off your first 2 months!

Macroscope sponsor

Telescope: A Cross-Browser Web Performance Testing Agent — Has support for Edge, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and lets you add various parameters to the command (via CLI or in a Node.js script), such as throttling, viewport size, and a generated HTML report.

cloudflare

Sonda: A Universal Bundle Visualizer and Analyzer — Works with many popular bundlers and frameworks and will generate an accurate interactive HTML report via source map analysis. Try a demo on the docs site.

Filip Sobol

🤖 React Grab: A React-Focused Tool for Agentic Development — Aiden is well known for his React Scan tool for detecting performance issues in React apps — now he’s turned his hand to giving coding agents React superpowers. It lets you “grab” context from your app’s components to feed to an agent of your choice for making detailed changes.

Aiden Bai and Ben Maclaurin

CanIUse Embed: Embed a 'Can I Use...' Compatibility Table on Your Site — Like similar tools, the data is based on the Can I Use website and MDN’s browser compatibility data. This purports to provide a more performant solution.

pengzhanbo

NativeWindUI: 30+ Reusable Components, Screens, & Flows for React Native
Ronin Technologies

Ipx.