New to the web platform in November

Discover some of the interesting features that have landed in stable and beta web browsers during November 2024.

Rachel Andrew

Published: November 27, 2024

Stable browser releases

In November 2024, Firefox 133 and Chrome 131 became stable. This post looks at the new features added to the web platform.

WebCodecs API

Firefox 133 supports the ImageDecoder, ImageTrackList, and ImageTrack interfaces of the WebCodecs API, enabling the decoding images from the main and worker threads.

Browser Support

  • Chrome: 94.
  • Edge: 94.
  • Firefox: 133.
  • Safari: not supported.

Source

The WorkerNavigator permissions property

Firefox 133 also supports WorkerNavigator.permissions.

Browser Support

  • Chrome: 43.
  • Edge: 79.
  • Firefox: 133.
  • Safari: 16.4.

Source

@page margin boxes

Chrome 131 adds support for page margin boxes, when printing a web document, or exporting it as PDF.

The @page margin boxes let you define the contents in the margin area of a page, for example to provide custom headers and footers, rather than using the built-in headers and footers generated by the browser.

Counters are also supported, for page numbering. The specification defines two special counter names: page for the current page number and pages for the total number of pages.

Learn more in Add content to the margins of pages printed using CSS.

Browser Support

  • Chrome: 131.
  • Edge: not supported.
  • Firefox: not supported.
  • Safari: not supported.

Support for currentcolor in relative color syntax

Chrome 131 allows relative colors in CSS (using the from keyword) to use currentcolor as a base. This lets you set complementary colors, based on an element's text color, for that element's borders, shadows, or backgrounds.

Uint8Array methods

Firefox 133 adds a number of new Uint8Array methods to ease conversions between base64- and hex-encoded strings and byte arrays:

  • Uint8Array.fromBase64() and Uint8Array.fromHex()
  • Uint8Array.prototype.setFromBase64() and Uint8Array.prototype.setFromHex()
  • Uint8Array.prototype.toBase64() and Uint8Array.prototype.toHex()

Browser Support

  • Chrome: not supported.
  • Edge: not supported.
  • Firefox: 133.
  • Safari: 18.2.

Source

WebHID on dedicated workers

Chrome 131 enables WebHID inside dedicated worker contexts. This lets you perform heavy I/O and processing of data from a HID device on a separate thread, helping to reduce the performance impact on the main thread.

Browser Support

  • Chrome: 131.
  • Edge: 131.
  • Firefox: not supported.
  • Safari: not supported.

Beta browser releases

Beta browser versions give you a preview of things that will be in the next stable version of the browser. It's a great time to test new features, or removals, that could impact your site before the world gets that release. New betas are Firefox 134, Safari 18.2, and Chrome 132. These releases bring many great features to the platform. Check out the release notes for all of the details. Here are just a few highlights.

Safari 18.2 includes the Uint8Array methods, mentioned earlier in this post as shipping in Firefox, and the @page margin descriptors that shipped in Chrome this month. There's a good list of new CSS features, including support for cross-document view transitions, ruby-align, and text-box-trim.

Chrome 132 includes support of sideways-rl and sideways-lr keywords for the writing-mode CSS property, toggle events for <dialog>, and a bytes() method for the Request and Response interfaces.

Firefox 134 is light on details right now, however it looks to include Promise.try which is also in the Safari 18.2 beta.