Under the Hood of MDN's New Frontend — The hugely useful MDN has rebuilt its frontend stack from the ground up, ditching React for web components and a homegrown server component system. A great read on building a modern, content-heavy site without shipping unnecessary JavaScript on every page.

Leo McArdle (MDN)

Ship Mobile Apps The Way You Ship Websites — Expo gives JavaScript developers a web-like workflow for native mobile. Hot reload on device. OTA updates that skip app store review. Cloud builds that work like Vercel. Start with npx create-expo-app.

Expo sponsor

IN BRIEF:

• Google will penalize sites that 'hijack' the back button in its search results from June. "Ensure you are not doing anything to interfere with a user's ability to navigate their browser history," says Chris Nelson.

• TanStack Start now has (experimental) React Server Components support.

• 🇫🇷 dotJS returns to Paris, France this September 18 – its CFP is open for two more weeks if you'd like to speak.

• 🇷🇴 The JSHeroes conference is back this May 14-15 in Romania.

RELEASES:

• Bun v1.3.12 – The JS runtime now ships with native, headless browser automation built in, and Bun.cron provides an in-process task scheduler.

• ⚠️ React 19.2.5, 19.1.6 and 19.0.5 have been released to deploy a fix for a React Server Components vulnerability.

• React Native 0.85 – New animation backend and devtools improvements.

• pnpm v11.0 RC 0, React Three Fiber 9.6, Electron 41.2, DOMPurify 3.4

📖  Articles and Videos

Installing Every Firefox Extension — One person’s entertaining and heroic tale of wielding JavaScript to explore the Firefox extension ecosystem. And what oddities there are within! I enjoyed this a lot, it’s like Alice in Wonderland for developers. More spelunking like this please.

Jack Cab

🛠 Code & Tools

• Mantine 9.0 – The wildly popular React component suite now includes a complete set of calendar scheduling components.

• wa-sqlite 1.1 – WebAssembly build of SQLite enabling JavaScript-based virtual filesystems and browser storage extensions. (Demo.)

• gridstack.js 12.6 – Build responsive drag-and-drop multi-column dashboards.

• Formula.js 4.6 – Excel's formula functions, but for JavaScript.

• Lexical 0.43 – Facebook's extensible text editor framework.

📢  Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Windows 95 as an Electron App — A full Windows 95 experience as an app on macOS, Linux, and Windows, built upon the v86 JavaScript + WASM emulator. v5.0 is a big release as you can mount a folder from your machine into it as a Z: drive, mount ISOs as CD-ROMs, there’s a shared clipboard, and Internet access has been improved. I’m so trying to get Microsoft Encarta’s Mindmaze running on this…

Felix Rieseberg

• 🎨 Sticking to the retro theme, a new release of JSPaint has landed too, so you can relive the joy of using MS Paint. Try it here.

• It's ten years since Domenic Denicola posted about adding JavaScript modules to the web platform – how far we've come since!

• GitHub has a private preview of 'stacked PRs', a feature to break large changes into smaller, dependent parts.

• TanStack Router, Start, and Query have gained beta support for Solid 2.0.

• 🎤 A 50-minute chat (with transcript) from two of the developers behind the npmx project — an increasingly popular way to browse the npm registry.

• JSON Alexander is a new JSON viewer extension for Chrome and Firefox from Wes Bos, complete with a snazzy George Costanza logo.