New to the web platform in February

Discover some of the interesting features that landed in stable and beta web browsers during February 2023.

Rachel Andrew

Stable browser releases

In February 2023, Firefox 110 and Chrome 110 became stable. Let's take a look at what this means for the web platform.

Container queries in all three engines

Firefox 110 included support for size container queries, making this key feature available in all three engines.

CSS initial letters

Chrome 110 adds support for the CSS initial-letter property. This property sets the number of lines an initial letter should sink into the following lines of text. Learn more in the post Control your drop caps with CSS initial-letter.

ReadableStream async iteration

Firefox added support for the async iterable protocol in ReadableStream.

AudioContext.setSinkId()

In Chrome AudioContext.setSinkId sets the ID of the audio device to use for output. This allows the AudioContext to route audio to a connected output device of the user's choosing.

Learn more about this feature in the post Change the destination output device in Web Audio.

IFrame credentialless

Also in Chrome, IFrame credentialless gives developers a way to load documents in third party iframes using new and ephemeral contexts. Iframe credentialless are a generalization of COEP credentialless to support third-party iframes that may not deploy COEP. This removes the constraint that third-party iframes must support COEP in order to be embedded in a COEP page and will unblock developers looking to adopt cross-origin-isolation.

Learn more about iframe credentialless.

Early stable

Chrome 110 also marked a change in the Chrome release schedule. The early stable release will roll out a week earlier than the general release, to a small percentage of users. You can learn more about this change in the article change in release schedule from Chrome 110.

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 111, Safari 16.4, and Chrome 111. 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.

Firefox adds support for the Origin Private File System (OPFS) when using the File System Access API.

Chrome includes all features described in CSS Color Level 4. This includes four device-independent color types (lab, Oklab, lch and Oklch), the color() function, and user-defined color spaces for gradients and animations. Also included is the color-mix() function from CSS Color 5.

Read the High definition CSS color guide to learn about these new color types and spaces.

Chrome also includes the View Transitions API, that enables polished transitions in Single-Page Applications (SPAs). Find out more in the documentation for View Transitions.

Also in Chrome 111 is the declarative shadow DOM, a new way to implement and use shadow DOM directly in HTML.

Safari 16.4 promises to be a huge release for the platform. For CSS the release includes support for the :user-invalid and :user-valid pseudo-classes, the margin-trim property, the range syntax for media queries, and support for the CSS Properties and Values API and @property.

Safari also includes support for Web Push, and the Badging API, along with a number of other Web APIs. It's a really exciting release that will see a number of features reach interoperability.

Part of the New to the web series