Discover some of the interesting features that have landed in stable and beta web browsers during December 2024.
Published: December 18, 2024
Stable browser releases
In December 2024 the only browser to release a new stable version was Safari with Safari 18.2. This post looks at the new features added to the web platform.
Baseline Newly available features in Safari 18.2
This release helps round out Baseline 2024 with a handful of features becoming Newly available.
Page setup with @page
The
@page
at-rule lets you dimensions and margins for content such as
printed documents, ebooks, or slides.
The ruby-align
and ruby-position
CSS properties
The
ruby-align
and
ruby-position
properties let you control how
ruby text is positioned and aligned within its container.
Learn more in
Line-breakable <ruby>
and CSS ruby-align
property.
Style scrollbars
With the CSS
scrollbar-gutter
and
scrollbar-width
properties now
Baseline Newly available, you can
customize the appearance of scrollbars in your web app.
::target-text
pseudo-element
The ::target-text
pseudo-element lets you style text highlighted by a
URL text fragment. You can now choose how to highlight the text to better
draw attention to it.
WebAssembly garbage collection and tail call optimization
Safari 18.2 includes support for these WebAssembly (Wasm) features, bringing them to Baseline Newly available.
You can learn more about WebAssembly garbage collection in WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) now enabled by default in Chrome, and read about why Google Sheets ported its calculation worker from JavaScript to WasmGC.
Cross-document view transitions
Safari 18.2 includes support for cross-document view transitions,
along with view transition classes and types, and support for the
pageswap
and pagereveal
events.
Uint8Array
methods
Safari 18.2 also includes the new Uint8Array
methods to ease conversions
between base64-
and hex-encoded strings and byte arrays:
Uint8Array.fromBase64()
andUint8Array.fromHex()
Uint8Array.prototype.setFromBase64()
andUint8Array.prototype.setFromHex()
Uint8Array.prototype.toBase64()
andUint8Array.prototype.toHex()
Beta browser releases
This month we don't have new features in beta to announce, due to the end of year. The Safari 18.3 beta is currently bug fixes, and Firefox 134, and Chrome 132 are still ongoing from last month.
We'll be back next year to let you know what's landing on the web platform in January 2025!