fidzu : javascript

#​769 - January 20, 2026

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

jQuery 4.0 Released - 20 years on from its original release, the ever-popular (in terms of actual usage) library reaches 4.0 with a migration to ES modules (compatible with modern build tools) along with dropping support for IE 10 and older. With jQuery being a popular guest in our newsletters in the early years, it's fantastic to see it pop back for a quick visit.

Timmy Willison

💡 If you're using jQuery, you'll find jQuery Migrate, an official tool to help you upgrade, useful. jQuery in 2026 is a somewhat legacy choice, though, and you might not need jQuery at all..

Add Excel-like Spreadsheet Functionality to Your JavaScript Apps - SpreadJS is the industry-leading JavaScript spreadsheet for adding advanced spreadsheet features to your enterprise apps. Build finance, analysis, budget, and other apps. Excel I/O, 500+ calc functions, tables, charts, and more. View demos now.

SpreadJS from MESCIUS inc sponsor

Astro is Joining Cloudflare - Big news in the Web framework space as the team behind the popular Astro framework (the beta of v6.0 is now available) is headed to Cloudflare. Few major frameworks are now not under the wing of a larger entity.

Schott and Irvine-Broque

IN BRIEF:

• 🕒 Temporal Playground is an online sandbox for playing around with the Temporal API.

• Svelte has released patches for five vulnerabilities affecting the Svelte ecosystem.

• 🤖 Ryan Dahl, creator of both Node.js and Deno, says on X that "the era of humans writing code is over" and "That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it." I hope not, but these are interesting times!

RELEASES:

• Electron 40.0 - The popular cross-platform desktop app framework upgrades to Chromium 144, V8 14.4, and Node 24.11.1.

• Node.js v25.4.0 (Current) - require(esm) is now marked as stable.

• React Native Windows 0.81, Aurelia 2 RC, Deno 2.6.5

📖 Articles and Videos

ASCII Characters Are Not Pixels: A Deep Dive Into ASCII Rendering - Alex digs deep into getting ASCII-based graphics rendering just right with JavaScript, complete with examples of the algorithms used and numerous demos. The neatest technical blog post I've seen so far this year.

Alex Harri

JavaScript Now a First-Class Citizen in Aspire - Aspire is a Microsoft framework for orchestrating the deployment of distributed apps. Originally just for .NET, Aspire 13 now makes JavaScript a first-class citizen, so you can run Vite and full-stack JS apps with service discovery, telemetry, and production-ready containers.

Microsoft

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future - 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, jest, Karma, Jasmine, and more.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Introducing the <geolocation> Element - Chrome 144 introduces a new <geolocation> element for requesting user location data, moving away from a JavaScript-triggered prompt.

Viana, Le, Steiner

📄 Bootstrapping Bun - "My journey running the build system for Bun … without relying on any of its usual binary dependencies - namely itself." Bradley Walters

📄 Building a Scroll-Driven Dual-Wave Text Animation with GSAP Valentin Descombes

📄 How the Electron Team Improved Window Resize Behavior Niklas Wenzel

📄 How to Learn to Build Apps in 2026 Eric Elliott

🛠 Code & Tools

Starry Night 3.9: GitHub-Like Syntax Highlighting - GitHub's own syntax highlighter isn't open source, but this library is a powerful alternative that tries to get as close as it can, with support for hundreds of languages. I've put a basic Web demo here to show off how to use it on the Web.

Titus Wormer

Extension.js 3: Browser Extension Development Framework - Create cross-browser extensions without manual build configuration and develop, build, and preview across browsers with a unified workflow. GitHub repo.

Cezar Augusto et al.

Easily Add Image Editing to your Web App - Import pintura, give it an image, and instantly get features like cropping, rotating, and annotation. Try for free today.

Pintura sponsor

React Aria: Adobe's World-Class React Components - React Aria has a fantastic new site and all-new documentation that really sells the entire experience, complete with interactive CSS and Tailwind examples to get started quickly.

Adobe

localspace: Modern localForage-Compatible Storage Toolkit - localForage is/was a popular storage library that wrapped various browser storage APIs with a simple, localStorage-like API. It hasn't been updated for years, though, and "localspace exists to bridge that gap".

Michael Lin

• ⭐ p5.js v2.2 - The powerful JavaScript visual/creative coding toolkit now includes WebGPU mode as a core feature (explained well here and here).

• 🎥 Mediabunny 1.29.0 - The TypeScript media toolkit adds support for reading and writing MPEG Transport Stream (.ts) files. Demo site.

• Prettier 3.8 - The opinionated code formatter adds full support for Angular 21.1 which was released last week.

• LogTape 2.0 - Simple logging library for all major JS runtimes. Changelog.

• ☎︎ vue-tel-input 9.6 - Telephone number input for Vue. (Demo.)

• d3-3d 2.0 - D3-powered visualizations, but projected into 3D.

• Convert 6.0 - Small, fast library for type-safe unit conversions.

• SuperDiff 4.0 - Rich readable diffs for arrays and objects.

• Jasmine 6.0 - Long-standing JavaScript BDD framework.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• 🔎 The VS Code team has put together a fascinating blog post about how they implemented a new, fast client-side docs search system for the VS Code site using Rust and WebAssembly. You can use their docfind engine for yourself too, and there's a live demo here showing off how fast it is over an index of 50,000 news articles.

• 📊 HTTP Archive has released its latest Web Almanac for 2025 packed with raw stats, trends, and observations about the state of the Web over the past year, covering areas like WebAssembly, performance, and ever-increasing page weight.

• A developer makes a prediction that Microsoft will eventually discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows-themed Linux distribution.

• Things are not looking good for the MySQL project.

• The State of WebAssembly in 2025 and 2026.

#​768 - January 13, 2026

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Web Dependencies are Broken; Can We Fix Them? - Lea, who has worked at the heart of Web Standards for years, delivers a compelling (and educational) call to action about a problem every JavaScript developer has encountered: why is managing dependencies and introducing them into code so unnecessarily messy and what could we do about it?

Lea Verou

Build Marketing Sites Like Apple - Learn how modern, high-impact marketing sites are built from someone doing it at the highest level. Matias Gonzales, Design Engineer at Vercel, teaches GSAP animation, scroll-driven storytelling, 3D with Three.js, and performance-first techniques used on award-winning sites.

Frontend Masters sponsor

IN BRIEF:

• 📺 The full set of React Conf 2025 videos is now online, made up of 25 talks and 23 interviews, including one with four members of the core team.

• There's a tiny update in the Deno-vs-Oracle JavaScript trademark dispute with Oracle requesting, and Deno agreeing to, a 60-day extension. As it stands, the case is set to drag into 2027.

• 📘 The Concise TypeScript Book is a short, focused TypeScript guide that's open and free to read.

RELEASES:

• Node.js January 13 2026 Security Releases - Long-awaited security releases of Node.js v20.x, 22.x, 24.x, and 25.x to resolve five different vulnerabilities.

• Bun v1.3.6 - Bun.Archive can now work with tar archives, Bun.JSONC supports parsing commented JSON, plus there are many performance optimizations and tweaks.

• pnpm 10.28 - The efficient package manager adds a beforePacking hook to customize package.json's contents at publish time.

• Angular 21.1 is expected this week. v21.1 rc0 landed last week teasing some of the updates.

• Ember 6.9, ESLint v10.0.0 RC0, Rspack 1.7

📖 Articles and Videos

Date is Out, Temporal is In - The Temporal API has been promised as a future API tackling the weaknesses of JavaScript's Date for many years now, but finally that future is arriving. Mat leans on numerous examples to show off Date's weaknesses and push Temporal's strengths here.

Mat "Wilto" Marquis

💡 Temporal's browser support still looks weak, but Chrome 144 - rolling out generally this week - brings full support. Temporal Polyfill also offers a stop-gap while native support grows.

How Wrong Can a JavaScript Date Calculation Go? - "the story of an issue that I faced that will be much easier to handle once Temporal is more widespread."

Phil Nash

Add GitHub, Slack & Google Integrations Without Rebuilding OAuth - WorkOS Pipes handles OAuth flows, token refresh, and storage. Users connect via a widget, your app makes one API call.

WorkOS sponsor

Stop Turning Everything Into Arrays (and Do Less Work Instead) - A post showing off iterator helpers, a broadly supported set of methods for working with Iterator objects as a more efficient way of processing data lazily in an iterative (rather than randomly accessed) fashion.

Matt Smith

How to 'Steal' Any React Component - A look at how to reproduce a component from a production React app without the original source, using React's internal data structures (via Fiber) and LLMs to reconstruct things.

David Fant

📄 JavaScript's for-of Loops Are Actually Fast Suren Enfiajyan

📄 Why ARM Has a 'JavaScript Instruction' - FJCVTZS, specifically. NotNotP

📄 How I Write Custom Elements with lit-html Dave Samaniego

📄 document.currentScript is More Useful Than I Thought Chris Coyier

📄 What Happened (and What's Happening) to WebAssembly Emnudge

🛠 Code & Tools

memlab 2.0: A Framework for Finding JavaScript Memory Leaks - A testing and analysis framework for identifying memory leaks and optimization opportunities that spawned from Facebook's own approach to optimizing its main app. Write scenarios, and memlab compares heap snapshots, filters memory leaks, and aggregates the results.

Facebook Open Source

The Time-Series Database That Balances Simplicity and Performance - Stay Postgres-native with automatic partitioning, 95% compression, and continuous aggregates at production scale.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Fabric.js 7.1: A Powerful SVG Abstraction Library - Provides an interactive object model on top of the HTML5 canvas to make it easier to work with multiple visual elements. Ideal for the browser but it works with Node too.

Fabric.js

Ohm: A Parsing Toolkit for JavaScript and TypeScript - It's been a few years since we covered this project and it's come along a lot since. It's a library for building PEG-based parsers you can use in interpreters, compilers, analysis tools, etc. and you can even play with its grammar online.

Warth, Dubroy, et al.

Superdiff 3.2: Compares Two Arrays or Objects and Return a Diff - Got two similar objects or arrays and want to see the underlying differences? Superdiff's recent updates boost performance, add support for streamed input and using a worker for more efficient diffing in a separate thread.

antoine

• JavaScriptKit 0.38 - Swift framework to interact with JavaScript via WebAssembly.

• 🎵 alphaTab 1.8 - Music notation and guitar tab rendering library.

• Neo.mjs v11.20 - Multi-threaded application engine for the Web.

• Monio 0.70.0 - Kyle Simpson's IO monad implementation.

• Ant Design 6.2 - UI design language and React UI library.

• xstyled 4.1 - Utility-first CSS-in-JS framework for React.

• Jint 4.5 - JavaScript interpreter for .NET.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• 🤖 Even Linus Torvalds is 'vibe coding' now. He's been using Google's Antigravity tool to create some digital sound effects.

• GitHub is planning to implement 'staged publishing' for npm packages in 2026 as a way to introduce a review step before releases go live.

• 🗓️ The Astro team shares a full 2025 year in review post. It's been a big year for the popular framework.

• Anil Dash shares the story of how Markdown took over the world.

• The results of the State of HTML 2025 survey are now available.

• TIL that Deno, the JavaScript runtime, is being distributed on Python's PyPI to make it easier for Python apps to call out to JavaScript as needed.

• In 2025, Bun was the third largest contributor to JavaScriptCore, the JavaScript engine powering both Safari and Bun.

#​767 - January 6, 2026

Read on the Web

🎉 Happy New Year. JavaScript Weekly is now landing in your inboxes on Tuesdays, so here we are! Let's see what 2026 brings.
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

The 2025 JavaScript Rising Stars - At the start of each year, Michael rounds up the projects in the JavaScript ecosystem that gained the most popularity on GitHub in the prior year. After a two-year run of topping the chart, shadcn/ui has been pushed down to #3 by n8n and React Bits. This is a fantastic roundup, now in its tenth(!) year, and features commentary from a few industry experts too.

Michael Rambeau et al.

Make Flaky Tests a Last-Year Problem - Meticulous creates and maintains a continuously evolving E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Built on Chromium with a deterministic engine, it's the only testing tool that eliminates flakes. Relied on by Dropbox, Notion, and Lattice.

Meticulous Ai sponsor

MicroQuickJS: A New JavaScript Engine from Fabrice Bellard - Fabrice, one of the world's most prolific developers well-known for creating FFmpeg, QEMU and QuickJS, is back with a new JavaScript engine targeting embedded systems, and that can run with as little as 10KB of RAM.

Fabrice Bellard

💡 The discussion about MicroQuickJS on Hacker News was particularly rich. Redis's creator, Salvatore Sanfilippo, even noted that Redis would have used JavaScript as its scripting language instead of Lua if this had existed in 2010.

IN BRIEF:

• pnpm's lead maintainer, Zoltan Kochan, presents a look back at how 2025 was a transformative year for the project.

• If you missed our final issue of 2025, be sure to check it out. We did a month-by-month rundown of what happened in the JavaScript world and shared the top ten links of the year.

• WebF is a new WHATWG-compliant web runtime for Flutter so you can build parts of Flutter apps using a more typical JS stack (React, Vue, etc.)

RELEASES:

• pnpm 10.27 - The alternative, efficient (and increasingly security-focused) package manager gets some tweaks, including a setting to ignore trust policy checks for packages published more than a specified time ago.

• Ink 6.6 - Use React to build CLI apps, as used by Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and many others.

• 🎨 Color.js v0.6 - The popular standards-compliant color conversion and manipulation library approaches its eventual 1.0 release.

• Prisma 7.2, Deno 2.6.4

📖 Articles and Videos

How to Compile JavaScript to C with Static Hermes - The creator of Parcel is porting parts of the project to Rust, but this raises some challenges on interoperating with existing JavaScript plugins, especially without a runtime JS interpreter. What about compiling JavaScript to C libraries that can be called directly? It's possible!

Devon Govett

🦖 Build a Dinosaur Runner Game with Deno - An ongoing series of posts (part two and three are also available) on the official Deno blog where you get to recreate something akin to Chrome's Dinosaur Game for yourself.

Jo Franchetti

How CERN Cut Storage by 95% and 40x'd Query Speed with TimescaleDB - Learn how CERN engineers modernized Large Hadron Collider time-series data for performance, scale, and cost efficiency.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Fixing TypeScript Performance Problems: A Case Study - A big monorepo-based TypeScript project was suffering sluggish IntelliSense, long type-checking times, and slow builds, but Solomon's team found some ways to significantly improve things.

Solomon Hawk

Why Object of Arrays (SoA Pattern) Beat Interleaved Arrays - A dive down a JavaScript performance rabbit hole.

Royal Bhati

📄 Brendan Eich Warns Against "Rushed Web UX Over Native" as Windows 11 Leans Harder on WebView2 and Electron Windows Latest

📄 Implementing Streaming JSON in Just 200 Lines of JavaScript Krasimir Tsonev

📄 Signals vs Query-Based Compilers Marvin Hagemeister

📄 The Nine Levels of JavaScript Dependency Hell Andrew Nesbitt

📄 How to Create a Pixel-to-Voxel Video Drop Effect with Three.js and Rapier Junichi Kasahara

🛠 Code & Tools

Schedule-X 3.6: A Material Design Calendar and Date Picker - Available in the form of React/Preact, Vue, Svelte, Angular, or plain JS components. Open source but with a premium version with extra features. GitHub repo.

Tom Österlund

📄 jsPDF 4.0: Client-Side JavaScript PDF Generation - Create tickets, documents, certificates, etc. all on the fly. There's a live demo, as well as thorough documentation.

Parallax

SurveyJS: JavaScript Libraries for Custom Web Forms - Keep full ownership of your data. Build JSON-driven forms in your app without SaaS limitations.

SurveyJS sponsor

Bruno 3.0: An Open-Source HTTP API Client App - There are a lot of 'API client' tools with varying levels of features, but this is open source and entirely built in JavaScript. v3.0 features a complete overhaul of the UI, adds workspaces for grouping things together, and more. GitHub repo.

Bruno Software Inc.

• JoltPhysics.js 1.0 - A popular C++ physics library can now be used from JavaScript thanks to Emscripten. Check out numerous demos here.

• 🎶 ChordSheetJS 13.0 - Library for parsing and formatting chords and chord sheets. (Demo.)

• Middy 7.0 - Node.js middleware engine for AWS Lambda. Now supports Durable Functions.

• PlayCanvas glTF Viewer 5.8 - 3D model viewer supporting glTF 2.0 and PLY.

• k6 1.5 - Modern Go + JavaScript-powered load testing tool. (Homepage.)

• 📊 Recharts 3.6 - Popular D3-powered React charting library.

• NATS.js 3.3 - JavaScript client for the NATS messaging system.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• For years, Mozilla, Apple, and the CSS Working Group have been working to bring "masonry" layouts (as above) natively to CSS. The concept is now called CSS Grid Lanes and here's how it works. You can already try it out in Safari Technology Preview 234.

• Addy Osmani shares 21 valuable lessons from spending 14 years at Google. Good general advice for remaining a competent and engaged engineer over time.

• Andy Pavlo has put together a neat review of what happened in the world of databases in 2025. Simon Willison has a similar review of LLMs in 2025.

• 🤖 Mattias Geniar explains how AI has made web development fun again (for him, at least).

• Ultimate Linux is a curious experiment to build a minimal userspace for Linux entirely in JavaScript.