Tech News - Front-End Web Development

Mozilla is constantly putting its efforts in developing new tools that ease the life of a data scientist. In March this year, it introduced Iodide, an experimental tool to create interactive documents using web technologies. And, yesterday, it has come up with another experimental tool called Pyodide to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser. Why Pyodide is introduced? JavaScript, the most popularly-used web language, does not offer a mature suite of data science library. It also lacks a number of features for numerical computing such as operator overloading. Mozilla aims to change this and bring data science-related tools to JavaScript. Additionally, it is also argued that Python’s limitation of not being able to run in the browser can prove to be a threat to the language itself. Mozilla in the blog wrote, “with so much user interaction happening on the web or on mobile devices, it needs to work there or be left behind.” What is Pyodide? Pyodide provides a full, standard Python interpreter, which runs entirely in the browser. It has full access to all the APIs that a browser provides. While it is closely related to the Iodide project, Pyodide can also be used standalone in any context you want to run Python inside a web browser. Here’s an example of what you can do with this tool. This example shows a 3D plot of the density of calls to the City of Oakland, California “311” local information service. Here the data loading and processing is performed in Python. The plotting is taken care off by WebGL, a JavaScript API for rendering 2D and 3D graphics within a compatible web browser. Source: Mozilla For creating Pyodide, the team has used the source code of the mainstream Python interpreter, CPython and the scientific computing packages such as NumPy. They did some small set of changes to make these tools work in the new environment. And, finally, the code was compiled to WebAssembly using Emscripten’s compiler. Pyodide enables you to fetch things over the network using the browser’s APIs and will come with support for threading in the near future. However, there is very less chance that it will ever support features such as low-level networking sockets because of the browser’s security sandbox. Some of the big legends in Python have appreciated this project: https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1118733186253479936 https://twitter.com/pwang/status/1118753387967909888 To know more in detail, check out the official announcement by Mozilla. Mozilla and Google Chrome refuse to support Gab’s Dissenter extension for violating acceptable use policy Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs Mozilla introduces Iodide, a tool for data scientists to create interactive documents using web technologies  

Earlier this year, Gab, the “free speech” social network and a popular forum for far-right viewpoint holders and other fringe groups, launched a browser extension named Dissenter that creates an alternative comment section for any website. The plug-in is now removed from the extension stores of both Mozilla and Google, as the extension violates their acceptable use policy. This decision comes after Columbia Journalism Review reported about the extension to the tech giants. https://twitter.com/nausjcaa/status/1116409587446484994 The Dissenter plug-in, which goes by the tagline “the comment section of the internet”, allows users to discuss any topic in real-time without fearing that their posted comment will be removed by a moderator. The plug-in failed to pass the review process of Mozilla and is now disabled for Firefox users. But, the users who have already installed the plug-in can continue to use it. The Gab team took to Twitter complaining about Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy. https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1116036111296544768 When asked for more clarity on which policies Dissenter did not comply with, Mozilla said that they received abuse reports for this extension. It further added that the platform is being used for promoting violence, hate speech, and discrimination, but they failed to show any examples to add any credibility to their claims. https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1116088926559666181 The extension developers responded by saying that they do moderate any illegal conduct or posts happening on their platform as and when they are brought to their attention. “We do not display content containing words from a list of the most offensive racial epithets in the English language,” added the Gab developers. Soon after this, Google Chrome also removed the extension from Chrome Extension Store stating the same reason that the extension does not comply with their policies. After getting deplatformed, the Dissenter team has come to the conclusion that the best way forward is to create their own browser. They are thinking of forking Chromium or the privacy-focused web browser, Brave. “That’s it. We are going to fork Chromium and create a browser with Dissenter, ad blocking, and other privacy tools built in along with the guarantee of free speech that Silicon Valley does not provide.” https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1116308126461046784 Gab does not moderate views posted by its users until they are flagged for any violations and says it “treats its users as adults”. So, until people are complaining, the platform will not take any appropriate action against the threats and hate speech posted in the comments. Though it is known for its tolerance for fringe views and has drawn immense heat from the public, things took turn for the worse after the recent Christchurch shooting. A far-right extremist who shot dead 20+ Muslims and left 30 others injured in two Mosques in New Zealand, had shared his extremist manifesto on social media sites like Gab and 8chan. He had also live-streamed the shooting on Facebook, Youtube, and others. This is not the first time when Gab has been involved in a controversy. Back in October last year, PayPal banned Gab following the anti-Semitic mass shooting in Pittsburgh. It was reported that the shooter was an active poster on the Gab website and has hinted his intentions shortly before the attack. In the same month, hosting provider Joyent also suspended its services for Gab. The platform has also been warned by Stripe for the violations of their policies. Torba, the co-founder of Gab, said, “Payments companies like Paypal, Stripe, Square, Cash App, Coinbase, and Bitpay have all booted us off. Microsoft Azure, Joyent, GoDaddy, Apple, Google’s Android store, and other infrastructure providers, too, have denied us service, all because we refuse to censor user-generated content that is within the boundaries of the law.” Looking at this move by Mozilla, many users felt that this actually contradicts their goal of making the web free and open for all. https://twitter.com/VerGreeneyes/status/1116216415734960134 https://twitter.com/ChicalinaT/status/1116101257494761473 A Hacker News user added, “While Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and now Mozilla may think they're doing a good thing by blocking what they consider hateful speech, it's just helping these people double down on thinking they're in the right. We should not be afraid of ideas. Speech != violence. Violence is violence. With platforms banning more and more offensive content and increasing the label of what is bannable, we're seeing a huge split in our world. People who could once agree to disagree now don't even want to share the same space with one another. It's all call out culture and it's terrible.” Many people think that this step is nothing but a step towards mass-censorship. “I see it as an active endorsement of filter funneling comments sections online, given that despite the operators of Dissenter having tried to make efforts to comply with the terms of service Mozilla have imposed for being listed in their gallery, were given an unclear rationale as to how having "broken" these terms, and no clue as to what they were supposed to do to have avoided doing so,” adds a Reddit user. Mozilla has not revoked the add-on’s signature, so Dissenter can be distributed while guaranteeing that the add-on is safe and can be updated automatically. Manual installation of the extension from Dissenter.com/download is also possible. Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs Mozilla adds protection against fingerprinting and Cryptomining scripts in Firefox Nightly and Beta Mozilla is exploring ways to reduce notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

Google Chrome will soon support something called LazyLoad, a feature that allows browsers to delay the loading of out-of-view images and iframes until the user scrolls near them, shared Scott Little, a Chromium developer yesterday. Why LazyLoad is introduced? Very often, web pages have images and other embedded content like ads placed below the fold and users don’t always end up scrolling all the way down. LazyLoad tries to take the advantage of this behavior to optimize the web browser by loading the important content much faster and hence reducing the network data and memory usage. LazyLoad waits to load images and iframes that are out of view until the user scrolls near them. It is up to the browser to decide exactly how “near”, but it should typically start loading the out-of-view content some distance before the content comes in view. Currently, there are few JavaScript libraries that can be used for lazy loading images or other kinds of content. But, natively supporting such feature in the browser itself will make it easier for websites to take advantage of lazy loading. Additionally, with this feature browsers will be able to automatically find and load content that are suitable for lazy loading. The LazyLoad solution will be supported on all platforms. Web pages just need to use loading="lazy" on the img and iframe elements. For Android Chrome users who have Data Saver turned on, elements with loading="auto" or unset will also be lazily loaded if Chrome finds them to be good candidates for lazy loading based on heuristics. If you set loading="eager" on the image or iframe element they will not be lazily loaded. To read more in detail about LazyLoad, check out its GitHub repository. Google’s Cloud Healthcare API is now available in beta Ian Goodfellow quits Google and joins Apple as a director of machine learning Google dissolves its Advanced Technology External Advisory Council in a week after repeat criticism on selection of members  

Yesterday, Mozilla announced that it is launching two experiments to understand how they can reduce “permission prompt spam” in Firefox. Last year, it did add a feature in Firefox that allows users to completely block the permission prompts. It is now planning to come up with a new option for those who do not want to take such a drastic step. Permission prompts have become quite common nowadays. It allows websites to get user permission for accessing powerful features when needed. But, often it gets annoying for users when they are shown unsolicited, out-of-context permission prompts, for instance, the ones that ask for permission to send push notifications. Mozilla's telemetry data shows that notifications prompt is the most frequently shown permission prompt, with about 18 million prompts shown on Firefox Beta from Dec 25 2018 to Jan 24 2019. Out of these 18 million prompts, not even 3 percent were accepted by users. And 19 percent of the prompts caused users to immediately leave the site. Such a low acceptance of this feature led to the following two conclusions: One, that there are some websites that show the notification prompt without the intent of using it to enhance the user experience, or fail to express their intent in the prompt clearly. Second, there are websites that show the notification permission prompt for too early, without giving users enough time to decide if they want them. To get a better idea on how and when websites should ask for notification permissions, Mozilla is launching these two experiments: Experiment 1: Requiring user interaction for notification permission prompts in Nightly 68 The first experiment involves requiring a user gesture, like a click or a keystroke to trigger the code that requests permission. From April 1st to 29th, requests for permission to use Notifications will be temporarily denied unless they follow a click or keystroke. In the first two weeks, no user-facing notifications will be shown when the restriction is applied to a website. In the last two weeks of this experiment, an animated icon will be shown in the address bar when this restriction is applied. If the user clicks on the icon, they will be presented with the prompt at that time. Experiment 2: Collecting interaction and environment data around permission prompts from release users Mozilla believes that requiring user interaction is not the perfect solution to the permission spam problem. To come up with a better approach, it wants to get more insights about how Firefox users interact with permission prompts. So, they are planning to launch an experiment in Firefox Release 67 to gather information about the circumstances in which users interact with permission prompts. They will collect information about: Have they been on the site for a long time? Have they rejected a lot of permission prompts before? With this experiment, it aims to collect a set of possible heuristics for future permission prompt restrictions. To know more in detail, visit Mozilla’s official blog. Mozilla launches Firefox Lockbox, a password manager for Android Mozilla’s Firefox Send is now publicly available as an encrypted file sharing service Mozilla Firefox will soon support ‘letterboxing’, an anti-fingerprinting technique of the Tor Browser  

After launching the developer preview of accelerated mobile pages or AMP for email last year, Google announced its general availability yesterday. For utilizing AMP for email, you do not have to be restricted to Gmail as other major email providers including Yahoo Mail, Outlook.com, and Mail.Ru have also added support for AMP. What is AMP for email? AMP for email aims to take the simple text emails to the next level by making them interactive and engaging, which Google calls “dynamic emails”, like web pages without having the user to hit the browser. AMP for email promises that users will now be able to actually get things done within the email. For instance, users will be able to take actions like RSVP to an event, fill out a questionnaire, browse a catalog, or respond to a comment. AMP emails are designed to be compatible with the current email ecosystem using a new MIME part called “text/x-amp-html”. AMP for email supports many a subset of AMP markups, which includes carousels, forms, and lists. Also, if an email provider does not support AMP emails, it allows emails to fallback to HTML. How users and developers are reacting to this? Since the AMP initiative was first announced, it has faced criticism by many, so much so that there is a Twitter account named “GoogleAMPSucks”. Google AMP for email has also sparked a huge discussion on Hacker News. Many users think that this opens up an alternate channel for sending ads to users. One user commented, “Google is looking for alternative channels to sell ads through. Adding more complicated media to email increases the type of ads that can be sold. It won’t be right away, but it’s coming.” AMP for email provides senders new ways to revise the information in an email they have already sent. This will make emails mutable which is a concern for many users. Explaining how this feature can be misused, one of the users on Hacker News, said, “Sent an ad claiming that you had a given price for a full week, and then decided you didn't want to sell it for that anymore two days later? Handy that you can remove all evidence of your advertisement after you sent it.” Bron Gondwana, CEO of FastMail, also believes that the immutable behavior of emails is, in fact, its strength. He wrote in a blog post, “The email in your mailbox is your copy of what was said, and nobody else can change it or make it go away. The fact that the content of an email can’t be edited is one of the best things about POP3 and IMAP email standards. I admit it annoyed me when I first ran into it – why can’t you just fix up a message in place – but the immutability is the real strength of email. You can safely forget the detail of something that you read in an email, knowing that when you go back to look at it, the information will be exactly the same.” To read the official announcement, check out Google’s blog. European Union fined Google 1.49 billion euros for antitrust violations in online advertising Google announces Stadia, a cloud-based game streaming service, at GDC 2019 Google is planning to bring Node.js support to Fuchsia  

Yesterday, the team at Redox released Redox OS 0.5.0, a Unix like operating system written in Rust. The team has added important programs and libraries to this release. What’s new in Redox OS 0.50? Cairo This release comes with Cairo, a 2D graphics library that supports multiple output devices. It produces consistent output on all output media and takes advantage of display hardware acceleration when available. It is implemented as a library which is written in the C programming language, while the bindings are available for various programming languages. relibc Redox OS 0.50 features relibc, a portable POSIX C standard library which is written in Rust and supports Redox and Linux. It reduces the issues with newlib and further creates a safer alternative to a C standard library. It has been designed to be used under redox, as an alternative to newlib. Event system The event system has been redesigned for providing support for select and poll. This release comes with new packages added to the Cookbook as well as for memory mapping support implemented in it. Standard images This release comes with new images based on new bootloaders for coreboot and EFI. The team has worked towards providing libraries for EFI Rust development and for developing coreboot payloads in Rust. LLVM This release also features the LLVM Project which is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies. The LLVM Core libraries come with a target-independent optimizer and a code generation support for popular CPUs.          GLib This version of Redox OS comes with GLib which is the low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK+ and GNOME.                   Pixman Redox OS 0.50 comes with Pixman that is a low-level software library for pixel manipulation that features image compositing and trapezoid rasterization. Orbital widget toolkit This release comes with Orbital Widget Toolkit which is a multi-platform GUI toolkit for building user interfaces with Rust. This toolkit is based on the entity component system pattern which provides a functional-reactive API. It provides fast performance and ease over cross-platform development. Few users are happy and excited about this release and are appreciating the Redox team. A user commented on HackerNews, “Congrats on getting another release out the door! I was beginning to fear that momentum was stalling in lieu of PopOS. Keep up the great work!” The developer of Redox OS shared that there are still security concerns in the kernel with regards to memory management. He commented, “There are a couple known security issues in the kernel regarding memory management. One is that memory is granted in pages, so buffers passed to a scheme are over-mapped for the process handling it. You have to be root to handle a scheme, so it was not a high severity issue.” He further added that there are concerns with the grants which can be dropped by owning process and highlighted that more kernel work is needed. He commented, “Another is that grants can be dropped by the owning process while in use by another process. This can lead to the re-allocation of said grants in the owning process, making memory accessible to the other users of the grant. More kernel work is needed to prevent schemes from leaking data in this manner.” To know more about this news in detail, check out Redox’s official announcement. Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support LLVM 8.0.0 releases! JUnit 5.4 released with an aggregate artifact for reducing your Maven and Gradle files  

Yesterday, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 66. In this release, the Firefox team aimed to reduce the online annoyances users face by introducing features like Block Autoplay, scroll anchoring, and more. Key features Firefox 66 is packed with: Block Autoplay Often, when we visit a website for some research or reading an article, it all of a sudden starts playing a video or audio, which is quite distracting. In this release, Firefox prevents websites from playing audio and video automatically by default with a newly-added feature, Block Autoplay. If you have already visited a website and clicked on the play button of a video, Firefox will remember your preference and automatically play videos in the subsequent visits. You can also enable autoplay on your favorite website by adding them to your permission list. For this, you just need to visit the control center by clicking the “i” with a circle on the address bar. Then go to Permissions and select the “allow” option in the drop-down menu. Source: Mozilla Scroll anchoring The text part of a web page loads faster as compared to the images and ads. So, as you are reading the article, these slow-loading ads and images move the text around. Scroll anchoring solves this problem, by remembering where you are so that you are not interrupted by these slow-loading images or ads. Improved search experience If you are someone who opens everything in a new tab and ends up with 20 open tabs, like me, this new feature in Firefox 66 is a savior for you. This version allows you to search tabs from the tab overflow menu, which appears when you have a large number of tabs open in a window. Additionally, Firefox 66 comes with a redesigned new tab for private browsing. Now, when you open a new tab in private browsing, it will show a search bar with your default search engine. To set your default search engine, go to Preferences, Search, then select Default Search Engine. Read the official announcement, to know about other exciting features Firefox 66 comes with. Mozilla’s Firefox Send is now publicly available as an encrypted file sharing service Mozilla Firefox will soon support ‘letterboxing’, an anti-fingerprinting technique of the Tor Browser Mozilla releases Firefox 65 with support for AV1, enhanced tracking protection, and more!

On Tuesday, Brendan Colloran, a data scientist at Mozilla, introduced an experimental tool called Iodide. This tool allows data scientists to create interactive documents using web technologies. As the tool is currently in alpha stage, it is not recommended to use it for critical work. Why Iodide is needed? Data scientists not only need to write code and analyze data, as a part of their job, they also have to share results and insights with the decision making teams. While they have a wide range of tools for analyzing the data like Jupyter Notebook and RStudio, there are a very few options for sharing the results in an effective way using web technologies. Often times, data scientists just copy the key figures and summary statistics to a Google Doc. Iodide aims to eliminate the round trips between exploring data in code and creating an understandable report. It also aims to make collaboration among data scientist very convenient. When a data scientist is reading another’s final report and wants to look at the code behind it, he can easily do so. How does Iodide work? Iodide provides a “explore view”, which consists of a set of panes. These include an editor for writing code, a console for viewing the output from code, and a workspace viewer for examining the variables you’ve created. In addition to these, it also has a “report preview” pane which shows the preview of your report. Source: Mozilla When you click on the REPORT button, the contents of your report preview will expand to fill the entire window. This is very useful for the readers who are not interested in the technical details as it will hide the code. Source: Mozilla Once the report is ready, users can send a link directly to their colleagues and collaborators. This will give them access to the clean and readable document as well as the underlying code and the editing environment. So, in case, they want to review your code, they can switch to the “explore mode”. If they want to use your code for their own work, they can fork it and start working on their own version, similar to the GitHub fork option. To know more in detail, check the blog post shared by Mozilla. Mozilla’s Firefox Send is now publicly available as an encrypted file sharing service Mozilla Firefox will soon support ‘letterboxing’, an anti-fingerprinting technique of the Tor Browser Mozilla shares key takeaways from the Design Tools survey

Yesterday, Google released version 73 of its popular web browser. Chrome 73 comes with support for PWAs for MacOS, signed HTTP exchanges for creating portable content, and constructable style sheets. DuckDuckGo now a default search engine Interestingly, Chrome 73 comes with a feature to change its default search engine to a to DuckDuckGo which is a more privacy-friendly option. Google acknowledges that it updated the available search engines based on "new usage statistics" from "recently collected data." DuckDuckGo is the preferred search option in more than 60 markets including the United States and the United Kingdom. Mac OS related updates Chrome 73 adds support for bringing Progressive Web Apps to Mac OS bringing PWAs to all desktop platforms - Mac, Windows, Chrome OS and Linux. Chrome 73 also includes the long-awaited dark mode for macOS. Dark mode was first announced for Chrome last month, but yesterday’s release has made it official. Signed HTTP Exchanges Chrome 73 comes with Signed HTTP Exchanges (SGX) which makes it “possible to create “portable” content that can be delivered by other parties, and this is the key aspect, it retains the integrity and attribution of the original site.” SGX is a part of Web Packages. Signed HTTP exchanges enables faster content delivery for users, making it possible to get the benefits of a CDN without having to cede control of your certificate’s private key. Check out Kinuko’s Signed HTTP Exchanges post for details on how to get started. Constructable style sheets Chrome 73 users can now create and distribute reusable styles using Constructable Stylesheets. Constructable Stylesheets make it possible to define and prepare shared CSS styles, and then apply those styles to multiple Shadow Roots or the Document easily and without duplication. To get started, you can create a new instance of CSSStyleSheet, then use either replace or replaceSync to update the stylesheet rules. Other updates There is a new regular expression called matchAll(). It is a matching method on the string prototype, and returns an array containing the complete matches. The <link> element now supports imagesrcset and imagesizes properties to correspond to srcsetand sizes attributes of HTMLImageElement. Blink's shadow blur radius implementation, now matches Firefox and Safari. These are just a select few updates. For more details, visit the Google’s developer blog. Chrome announces KV Storage, the first built-in module for Web You can now publish PWAs in the Google Play Store as Chrome 72 for Android ships with Trust Web Activity feature. Google releases a fix for the zero day vulnerability in its Chrome browser while it was under active attack.

Yesterday Mozilla announced Firefox Send to be publicly available, which initially was a “Test Pilot” experiment. Firefox Send is a free file sharing service that allows users to easily and securely share files with end-to-end encryption from any browser. By the end of this week, a beta version of its Android app will also be available to the users. How does Firefox Send work? Firefox Send is intended to be an alternative to email, where larger file attachments are not supported. Users do have cloud storage options like Google Drive and Dropbox, but these can be time-consuming in cases where we just need to share a single file for a limited amount of time. You can use the service by visiting the Firefox Send website, upload your file, and set an expiration period. Additionally, it also provides users an option to password protect their files before sending. You will then get a link that you can share with a recipient. Check out the following video to know how exactly it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRHpEn2eHJA Firefox Send comes with various features and advantages Firefox Send maintains the security of your files by providing end-to-end encryption from the moment a file is sent until it is opened. With Firefox Send, you can share files of size up to 1 GB. If you want to share files of size up to 2.5 GB you need to sign up for a free Firefox account. For the file recipients, it is not compulsory to have a Firefox account to access the shared file. They just need to simply click on the received link and download the file. It puts control in the hands of a user by allowing them to choose when a file link gets expired, the number of times their file can be downloaded, and also allows adding an optional password. These features come in handy when you want to give the recipient only one-time or limited access to your files and hence ensures that your information is not available online indefinitely. To know more about Firefox Send, check out the Mozilla official announcement. Mozilla Firefox will soon support ‘letterboxing’, an anti-fingerprinting technique of the Tor Browser Mozilla engineer shares the implications of rewriting browser internals in Rust Common Voice: Mozilla’s largest voice dataset with approx 1400 hours of voice clips in 18 different languages  

After releasing the RC0 version of React Native 0.59, the team announced its stable release yesterday. This release comes with some of the most awaited features including React Hooks, updated JavaScriptCore, and more. Support for React Hooks React Hooks were introduced to solve a wide variety of problems in React. It enables you to reuse stateful logic across components without having to restructure your components hierarchy. With React Hooks, you can split a component into smaller functions, based on what pieces are related rather than forcing a split based on lifecycle methods. It also lets you use more of React’s features without classes. Updated JavaScriptCore The JavaScriptCore (JSC) is an engine that allows Android developers to use JavaScript natively in their apps. React Native 0.59 comes with an updated JSC for Android, and hence supports a lot of modern JavaScript features. These features include 64-bit support, JavaScript support, and big performance improvements. Improved app startup time with inline requires Applications now load resources as and when required to prevent slowing down the app launch. This feature is known as “inline requires”, which delay the requiring of a module or file until that module or file is actually needed. Using inline requires can result in startup time improvements. CLI improvements Earlier, React Native CLI improvements had long-standing issues and lacked official support. The CLI tools are now moved to a new repository and come with exciting improvements. Now, logs are formatted better and commands run almost instantly. Breaking changes React Native 0.59 has been cleaned up following Google's latest recommendations, which could result in potential breakage of existing apps. You might experience a runtime crash and see a message like this, “You need to use a Theme.AppCompat theme (or descendant) with this activity." Developers are recommended to update their project’s AndroidManifest.xml file to make sure that “android:theme” value is an AppCompat theme. Also, in this release, the “react-native-git-upgrade” command has been replaced with the newly improved “react-native upgrade” command. To read the official announcement, check out React Native’s website. React Native community announce March updates, post sharing the roadmap for Q4 React Native Vs Ionic: Which one is the better mobile app development framework? How to create a native mobile app with React Native [Tutorial]

In a meeting conducted last month, the CSS Working Group has agreed on introducing a few trigonometry functions in CSS. Created in 1997 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the CSS Working Group is responsible for discussing new features and tackling issues in CSS. Currently, they have approved the following 10 functions: Sine: sin() Cosine: cos() Tangent: tan() Arccosine: acos() Arcsine: asin() Arctangent: atan() Arctangent of two numbers x and y: atan2() Square root: sqrt() Square root of the sum of squares of its arguments: hypot() Power of: pow() CSS is no longer just limited to changing colors or fonts. Developers have been slowly relying on CSS for implementing much more complex tasks. CSS 3, its overhauled version, comes with several web animations, gradients, certain selectors, and more. However, CSS lacked the ability to work with angles and perform much more advanced mathematical operations than adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing two values. This decision comes after multiple requests by web developers to introduce trigonometric functions for simplifying implementations of many use cases that involve angles. These will be very handy in cases like syncing rotation angles, converting between angles and x/y dimensions, and more. Currently, for implementing these use cases developers had to either hardcode, use JavaScript, or a preprocessor, which is a pain. Explaining the need of trigonometric functions in CSS, one of the developers said, “In static markup, the solution is to hard-code approximate values, but that often leaves pixel gaps or discontinuities from rounding errors. In dynamic situations, as others have mentioned, the only solution is JavaScript (with lots of converting back and forth between radians for the JS functions and degrees or turns for my design and for SVG properties, which is the only time I usually need Math.PI!).” Developers are also requesting for reciprocal functions for calculating cotangent, secant, and cosecant. These will be very convenient but are currently not a priority. Read the discussion by CSS Working Group, check out its GitHub repository. Erlang turns 20: Tracing the journey from Ericsson to Whatsapp How you can replace a hot path in JavaScript with WebAssembly Bootstrap 5 to replace jQuery with vanilla JavaScript

Last week, the team behind the Dojo Toolkit announced the release of Dojo 5.0. This release comes with extended support for TypeScript versions from 2.6.x to 3.2.x, condition polyfills, better Build Time Rendering, and more. Dojo is a JavaScript toolkit that equips developers with everything they need to build a web app like language utilities, UI components, and more. New features and enhancements in Dojo 5.0 Conditional polyfills This release provides a better user experience by introducing an out-of-the-box solution for building and loading polyfills in Dojo applications. A polyfill is a piece of code, which implements a feature that web browsers do not support natively. The Dojo build will produce two platform bundles that will be loaded only if two key conditions are fulfilled. First, the shim module is imported somewhere in an application. Second, a user browser does not natively support the browser feature. This update means serving less JavaScript and hence improving the application performance without compromising on features. Better Build Time Rendering (BTR) This version comes with various stability and feature enhancements in BTR such as Dojo Blocks, support for StateHistory API, multiple page HTML generation, better error messaging, and more. BTR was supported in Dojo via the Dojo cli-build-app command since its initial 2.0.0 release. It provides rendering an application to HTML during the build and in-lines the critical CSS enabling the application to effectively render static HTML pages. It also comes with some advantages of server-side rendering (SSR) such as performance and SEO and eliminates the complexities of running a server to support full SSR. Dojo Blocks Dojo Blocks is a new mechanism that allows you to execute code in Node.js as part of the build. A Dojo Block module can do things like reading a group of markdown files, transforming them into VNodes, and making them available to render in the application, all at build time. The results of this Dojo module can be written to the cache that can be used at runtime in the browser. Simplifying testing with Assertion Templates Dojo 5.0 comes with Assertion Templates, that makes testing widgets easier. Earlier, developers had to manually curate each ‘expectedRender’ result per test. Assertion Templates solves this problem by allowing developers to easily modify and layer outputs for the expected render. To read the entire list of updates in Dojo 5.0, check out the official announcement. Dojo 4.0 released with support for Progressive Web Apps, a redesigned Virtual DOM, and more! npm at Node+JS Interactive 2018: npm 6, the rise and fall of JavaScript frameworks, and more Mozilla optimizes calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly in Firefox, making it almost as fast as JS to JS calls  

Yesterday, the team behind Preact, a fast and smaller alternative of React, announced that Preact X is now in alpha. Preact X is the next major release, which includes some of the in-demand features of React like Fragments, Hooks, componentDidCatch, and createContext. https://twitter.com/preactjs/status/1102726702860517376 Following are some of the updates Preact X alpha comes with: Support for fragments Preact X alpha supports fragments, which is the major feature in this release. Fragments allow you to group a list of children without adding extra nodes to the DOM. Developers can now return an array of children from a component’s render method, without having to wrap them in a DOM element. The componentDidCatch lifecycle method This release comes with the componentDidCatch lifecycle method for better error handling. To make a class component an error boundary, developers just need to define the componentDidCatch(error, info) method. This method was introduced in React 16 to prevent a single JavaScript error in the UI from breaking the whole app. This method works using a concept called error boundary. An error boundary is a component that is responsible for catching JavaScript errors in their child component tree. It also logs the error and displays a fallback UI instead of the component tree that crashed. Hooks Preact X alpha supports hooks, which are functions that allow you to “hook into” or use React state and other lifecycle features via function components. You can import hooks in Preact using preact/hooks. The createContext API The createContext API, as the name suggests, creates a Context object. If a component is rendered that subscribes to this Context object, it will read the current context value from the closest matching provider above it in the tree. The Preact team calls it a successor for getChildContext, which is fine when you are certain that the value will not change. The creatContext API is a true pub/sub solution that allows you to deliver updates deep down the tree. Devtools Adapter In order to support the recent updates in react-devtools extension, the team has rewritten Preact’s devtools adapter from scratch, which can now directly hook into the renderer.  This also makes feature development much straightforward for the team. Along with these excellent updates, this version also comes with a few breaking changes. The most noticeable one is that pros.children is not guaranteed to be an array anymore. This update is made to support rendering components that return an array of children without wrapping them in a root node. Check out Preact’s GitHub repo to read the entire list of updates in Preact X alpha. React Native 0.59 RC0 is now out with React Hooks, and more Getting started with React Hooks by building a counter with useState and useEffect React 16.8 releases with the stable implementation of Hooks

Yesterday, the community behind the Ember project released version 3.8 of the three sub-projects: Ember.js, Ember Data, and Ember CLI. Along with few bugfixes in Ember Data and Ember CLI, this release introduces two new features: element modifier manager and array helper. Updates in the Ember.js web framework Ember.js 3.8 is a long-term support candidate. This release is incremental, backward compatible and comes with two new features: element modifier manager and array helper. Element modifier manager Element modifier manager is a very low-level API, which will be responsible for coordinating the lifecycle events that are triggered when an element modifier is invoked, installed, and updated. Array helper Now you can create an array in a template with a new feature introduced in Ember.js 3.8, the {{array}} helper. The working of this helper is very similar to the already existing {{hash}} helper. Deprecations Computed property overridability: Computed properties in Ember.js are overridable by default when no setter is defined. As this behavior is bug-prone, it has been deprecated. The ‘readOnly()’ modifier that prevents this behavior will be deprecated once overridability has been removed. @ember/object#aliasMethod: This method, which allows you to add aliases to objects defined with EmberObject, is now deprecated as it is very little known and rarely used by developers. Component manager factory function: Now, setComponentManager does not require a string to associate the custom component class and the component manager. Instead, developers can pass a factory function that produces an instance of the component manager. Updates in Ember Data Not many changes have been made in this release of Ember Data. Along with updating the documentation, the team has updated ‘_scheduleFetch’ to ‘use _fetchRecord’ for belongsTo relationship. Updates in Ember CLI The {{content-for}} hook is updated to allow developers to use it in the same way when different types are specified, for instance, {{content-for 'head'}} {{content-for 'head-footer'}}. With this release, gitignore will ignore Yarn .pnp files. To read the entire list of updates, visit Ember’s official website. The Ember project announces version 3.7 of Ember.js, Ember Data, and Ember CLI The Ember project releases version 3.5 of Ember.js, Ember Data, and Ember CLI The Ember project announces version 3.4 of Ember.js, Ember Data, and Ember CLI