New to the web platform in December

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

Rachel Andrew

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() and Uint8Array.fromHex()
• Uint8Array.prototype.setFromBase64() and Uint8Array.prototype.setFromHex()
• Uint8Array.prototype.toBase64() and Uint8Array.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!