Front-End Fire

Although we’re already halfway through 2024, this week the State of JavaScript survey for 2023 dropped, and the hosts weighed in and discussed the results they found most interesting.

This year the survey provided a lot more write in options instead of predefined lists, which made extrapolating clear answers in many cases more difficult than it otherwise would have been, but there were still some clear winners in terms of usage and popularity among respondents. React and Next.js continued to dominate in the framework wars, Vite was beloved by most everyone, and the new category of AI tools was dominated by ChatGPT. There’s lots of interesting data here to peruse, but also some questions about the accuracy of results with having to normalize so many written responses.

Another topic of discussion was the new release of htmx 2.0. It’s dropping support for Internet Explorer, breaking out all the previously built-in extensions from the main project, and (most exciting of all) now offers a dark-mode version of the website.

We get an update on the React Suspense drama that began last week when the React team fundamentally wanted to change how Suspense is handled in React 19, and many library maintainers who rely on Suspense under the hood voiced concerns that it would severely impact how their libraries work. The React team has since backed off changing Suspense, and agreed to find a solution that works better for everyone, and we’ll update you on what that solution might be as soon as we know more.

And finally, Adobe continues to make headlines this year as the US Federal Trade Commission sues it over confusing and hard-to-cancel subscription plans. For a company as big and successful as Adobe, the fact that it uses confusing and obfuscated terms and conditions to penalize users who try to cancel subscriptions is shameful, and the US FTC is taking a stand against it.

News:

• Paige - htmx 2.0 is released
• Jack - State of JS 2023 results are in
• TJ - The US FTC sues Adobe (Full complaint)

Bonus news:

• The React team reverses course on proposed Suspense changes and Tkdodo’s summary of the Suspense drama
• Blue Collar Coder video on React Suspense

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Three Body Problem novel
• Jack - Cascadia JS conference
• TJ - Yellow Altra running shoes

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

In a rare turn of events, it was a slightly quieter week in terms of actual web development news, so the hosts round up some technology-adjacent news and drama to share.

Jack kicks off the show recounting his experience of being one of four developers in a reality show-type scenario that his friend Jason Lengstorf (host of the YouTube show “Learn with Jason”) put together.

Next up is more drama around how AI companies are training their LLMs. Up and coming AI company Perplexity’s getting some heat for ignoring the robots.txt files on websites banning AI companies from crawling the content to teach their models.

After that, TypeScript 5.5, previously in beta stage (in episode 42), has now reached release candidate stage. It brings with it inferred type predicates, regex syntax checking, and 33% smaller package size.

News:

• Paige - TypeScript 5.5 RC
• Jack - Don’t build another effin’ chatbot - Web Dev Challenge S1E1 (Learn with Jason)
• TJ - Perplexity and robots.txt drama and Apple is the first company charged with violating the EU’s DMA rules

Bonus news:

• window.ai

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Hunting Party book
• Jack - Bridgerton on Netflix
• TJ - The Paris Apartment

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

This week we’re all about beta releases and technical previews of AI that will make us even more productive coders.

Since the release of React 18, just over 2 years ago, the React team’s been hard at work, and at the end of April, React 19 beta dropped on npm. This new version brings Server Components and Server Actions out from behind the canary channel, stating they are now stable and will not break between major versions going forward. In addition to this, v19 introduces Actions: hooks for supporting asynchronous functions in transitions like form submission, designed to handle pending, error and optimistic updates in the UI automatically. There’s also a new use API, which can use Suspense to wait for promises to resolve (or contexts to be available) before rendering, and it can be done conditionally (something that hooks cannot). Additionally, React 19 offers better hydration errors, support for documentation metadata, stylesheets, asynchronous scripts, preloading resources, and custom elements. It’s a lot to take in, but there are upgrade guides and code mods to help developers itching to get started trying out this latest version of React.

Not to be outdone, TypeScript also released v5.5 beta as well! Highlights for this new release include: inferred type predicates (good for when you filter null values out of an array but TypeScript yells because it doesn’t realize you have), regular expression syntax checking (it can’t tell you if your regex will actually catch what you want it to, but will tell you if your expression is invalid), and type imports in JSDoc.

And GitHub expands on the capabilities of Copilot with the announcement of GitHub Copilot Workspaces: a Copilot-native development environment. Within Copilot Workspaces, developers can brainstorm, plan, build, test, and run code in natural language. Inside of a GitHub repo or issue, devs can tell Copilot agents to formulate a plan to fix the error or build a new feature, Copilot Workspaces offers a plan based on its understanding of the entire codebase, issue replies, and more, and everything from its plan to the code is entirely editable. Once a user likes the plan, they can run the code directly in Copilot Workspace and tweak until happy with the final result. It’s a lofty goal to be sure (and won’t be perfect right off the bat), but in a few years time this could be the new way we all code.

News:

• Paige - React 19 beta
• Jack - TypeScript 5.5 beta
• TJ - GitHub Copilot Workspace

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Kevin Can F**k Himself TV series
• Jack - Depth of Field project
• TJ - Let me be lightning talk from Ryan Florence

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

We’ve got an exciting episode with our co-host Jack Herrington fresh from his trip to React Conf where the React core team and close collaborators unveiled all the cool things they’ve been working on, including the much anticipated React Compiler and some exciting new features for React Native Expo.

React Compiler is a new Babel-enabled plugin that will allow React apps to handle the memoization and re-rendering of components in an application so that developers won’t have to use the useMemo() and useCallback() hooks themselves. It will essentially save devs from having to think about it (and save them from the foot guns of implementing it incorrectly), and it is completely optional (not built in to React 19) and can be done via incremental adoption across an already existing application.

In related news, Vercel (the creators of Next.js, the most popular React framework in the world) announced they had raised $250m in funding, and the company is currently valued at $3.25b. Just wow! While we can only assume some of that funding will go towards continuing to improve Next.js and their core business of web hosting, they also said they’ll continue to invest heavily in their v0 generative UI system, which currently generates copy-and-paste friendly React code using shadcn/ui and Tailwind CSS that people can use in their projects.

Another popular JavaScript framework, Astro, made a splash as well with its release of Astro 4.8. In addition to the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes, it added experimental support for Astro Actions with niceties like full type-safety, a single global action file that any client component can access, automatically parsing form request objects using a Zod schema, and progressive enhancement on forms.

Finally, the news wraps up with some new features that came out in the Safari 17.5 release.

News:

• Paige - Astro Actions in v4.8
• Jack - React Compiler, React Compiler Playground, Jack’s in-depth video of React Compiler
• TJ - Vercel raises $250m; valued at $3.25b

Bonus News:

• TJ - Safari 17.5

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Parks and Recreation TV series
• Jack - How to ADHD book
• TJ - NYT games

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire

We kick off this week’s episode with news that React Native framework Expo now has a developer preview of universal React Server Components. For the first time ever, you can use React Server Components & Server Actions in native apps.

In a controversial move, Amazon has mandated all employees must return to offices by Jan 2025. The hosts discuss the pros and cons of working from the office vs remote, and speculate this is just another way for Amazon to conduct layoffs without actually laying more employees off.

CSS masonry, a long yearned for feature, gets closer to reality. The Google Chrome and Apple WebKit teams have differing opinions about how CSS masonry’s syntax should be added to the spec (reuse CSS grid or create a whole new layout property for masonry), and they want devs to weigh in to help make the final decision.

News:

• Paige - CSS masonry layout controversy
• Jack - React Native has beta RSCs
• TJ - Amazon is making its employees come back to the office

Bonus News:

• CSS gets a new logo that’s not a shield! - h/t to Adam Argyle for this breaking news
• Regulators causing nuclear power issues for Meta and Amazon
• WordPress tracking sites leaving WP Engine hosting

Fire Starters:

• CSS stretch keyword

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Unreasonable Hospitality book
• Jack - Lioness TV show
• TJ - Daisy Darker

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com