Front-End Fire

We wrap up the podcast with an end of year holiday spectacular episode! Instead of the usual news, the hosts share the biggest front end stories of 2024, the most fascinating developments, and the moments that made us happiest.

Thank you, Front-End Fire listeners! We couldn’t have done this without you. Wishing you a wonderful holiday season, and we can’t wait to bring you more frontend goodness in 2025.

Biggest Story of the Year for Frontend Devs:

• Paige - Vite and void(0)
• Jack - React 19 drama and delays
• TJ - The rise in AI tooling, and how we move forward with it

Most Interesting Story of 2024:

• Paige - Apple’s not-so-great year: Apple Vision Pro, EU legal issues, Apple Intelligence 
• Jack - AI app builders: v0, bolt.new, etc.
• TJ - Wordpress Drama

What Made You Happy in 2024:

• Paige - Consistent practice of hobbies
• Jack - Growing this podcast and quality time with friends and family
• TJ - Getting back into reading

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

In our last news episode of the year, we share that React 19 is declared stable, just in time for the holidays. It’s been a long road from release candidate in April to stability now, but it was well worth the wait. React 19 is packing a lot of features, including: Actions, hooks, form actions, the new use API, and of course, React Server Components and Server Actions.

OpenAI’s been busy as well, introducing ChatGPT Pro, its $200 a month subscription for unlimited access to OpenAI o1 (the “reasoning model), GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice mode. Additionally, the startup announced the ChatGPT desktop app for macOS can now read code in a handful of developer-focused coding apps, like VS Code, XCode, Terminal, and iTerm2.

There’s a new challenger to Figma for styling React-based code bases called Onlook. Onlook is a browser-based product studio that lets you design React code with Tailwind CSS using an easy-to-use interface just like you would in Figma.

News:

• Paige - Onlook, the power Figma in your React app
• Jack - React 19 is stable
• TJ - OpenAI announcements: ChatGPT Pro and Work With Apps

Bonus News:

• Quantum Computing Inches Closer to Reality
• iOS 18.2 and Apple Intelligence

Fire Starters:

• Customizable Selects (Wes Bos video)

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Black Doves TV series and The Midnight Feast book
• Jack - Seestar-S50 All-in-one smart telescope
• TJ - Christmas Village in Grand Rapids, MI

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

The new JavaScript package manager and serverless registry vlt debuted recently, promising to be a drop-in replacement for existing package managers like npm with additional offerings like a dependency query syntax selector and GUI experience for dependency graphs.

Vite 6.0 released this week, and its biggest improvement is the new experimental Environment API. The Environment API is designed so that framework authors can create as many environments as they need within a single Vite server so they can map the way their apps work in production. 

Astro 5.0 also enters primetime with Astro Content Layers that loads content from any source, Server Islands to combine cached, static content with dynamic content, simplified prerendering, and Vite 6 support (using the new Environment API, mentioned in the last paragraph).

News:

• Paige - Vite 6.0 is out
• Jack - Astro 5.0 release
• TJ - vlt Client and Serverless Registry

Bonus News:

• Deno v. Oracle: Canceling the JavaScript Trademark
• GenAIScript

Fire Starters:

• Details disclosure HTML element

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Diplomat TV series
• Jack - Retaining your thumbs thanks to SawStop
• TJ - Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone and StoryGraph book tracker

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

Co-host Jack Herrington is just back from the React Summit conference in New York and he shares some of the highlights of the conf, including the announcement that TanStack Start is now in beta status and Tanner Linsely (the creator of the TanStack products) will be working on it full time.

Additionally, React-based animation library Framer Motion announces it has spun off into open source library Motion. Going forward, Motion will provide vanilla JS APIs so every JavaScript project can take advantage of the smooth, easy-to-use animations that were previously only available to React applications. 

The US government’s taken aim at Google, asking Google’s antitrust trial judge to force the company to sell off its Chrome browser after the judge ruled Google’s maintained an illegal search monopoly. These are the dramatic opening shots that will, most likely, become much less contentious than Google actually divesting itself of Chrome when a deal with the DOJ is reached, but it’s definitely a warning to other large tech companies to watch their market share.

As a final note, we won’t be recording a show next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, but will be back after that with all the latest news.

News:

• Paige - Framer Motion becomes just Motion
• Jack - TanStack Start is in beta status
• TJ - US proposes breakup of Google to fix search monopoly

Bonus News:

• The State of JS survey 2024 is now open
• AI tool calling is the next big thing

Fire Starters:

• scrollIntoView()

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Stubby car drying nozzle leaf blower attachment
• Jack - Air tag-enabled water bottle lid
• TJ - Silver Bells in Lansing

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

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

The AI race continues with lots of new updates straight from the GitHub Universe conference!

New features from GitHub include: the ability to choose different AI models for GitHub Copilot Chat to use (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, etc.), Copilot Workspaces reviewing PRs, suggesting code changes, and validating fixes.

In addition to the GH Universe announcements, the October VS Code release has a bunch of new Copilot additions like: Copilot Edits to change multiple files at once, Copilot Chat in a secondary sidebar, and Copilot code reviews before committing to GitHub.

Next.js’s caching, which defaulted to very aggressive in the past, has been updated big time in Next.js 15. Now, when devs add a request that fetches external data, they’ll be prompted to either wrap it in a Suspense tag or explicitly mark the module or function with the “use cache” directive. This gives devs more fine grained cache control allowing some routes to have dynamic, Suspense-supported data, while others have static, cached data.

In bonus news, the open source Flutter community decided to fork the project because it feels Google’s core Flutter team doesn’t have enough resources internally and isn't fast enough at reviewing PRs and implementing new features. “Flock” aims to add the bug fixes, popular community features, and generally be faster and more agile than Flutter.

And today’s Fire Starter is about HTTP/3: the newest revision of the HTTP which offers better speed, security, and reliability.

News:

• Paige - GitHub Spark and GitHub Universe updates in general
• Jack - use cache changes in Next.js 15
• TJ - VS Code 1.95

Bonus News:

• Flutter gets forked to Flock

Fire Starters:

• HTTP/3

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - All Recipe’s Trends page
• Jack - Phone security cord
• TJ - The Will of the Many book series and Kindle e-reader

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

In a special guest episode, Rob Eisenberg joins the podcast to talk about the role web components play in today’s web development ecosystem. Rob is uniquely qualified to discuss web components, as the former architect for Microsoft’s web component tech stack, FAST, used by about 1,500 internal MSFT teams, and creator of the Web Component Engineering course. 

Special Guest(s):

• Rob Eisenberg, Founder and Chief Software Architect at Blue Spire, former architect for Microsoft’s FAST Web Components technology, creator of the Web Component Engineering course, and Web Standards advocate. 
• Rob on Twitter @EisenbergEffect
• Rob’s Web Component Engineering course
• Rob on LinkedIn
• Rob on GitHub
• Rob on Medium

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Da Vinci Eye app
• TJ - GitHub Copilot updates
• Rob - Buttermilk Pancakes

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

Jack is away this week speaking at the React Advanced conference in London, so be sure to check out his recorded talk (and all the others) about if React is really dying.

For the news this week, we’ve got a bunch of interesting topics, the first of which is the latest release of Next.js: Next 15. It’s stable and production ready offering React 19 and React Compiler (experimental) support, Turbopack Dev, improvements to caching, and a change to async Request APIs that will allow for simplified rendering and caching in the future. 

Svelte 5 is also officially stable and production ready debuting the new Runes system which offers Svelte users fine-grained reactivity control via Signals. Svelte previously relied on the compiler for reactivity, which could begin to break down for larger apps, so it was rewritten from the ground up and Runes was born.

Finally, vote for this podcast in the State of React survey out now! We’re under the Resources > Podcasts section and would greatly appreciate your support.

News:

• Paige - Svelte 5 is alive
• TJ - Next 15
• Jack’s React Advanced talk

Bonus News:

• Vote for this podcast in the State of React survey (section Resources > Podcasts)!
• The Browser Company who built Arc is now building another new browser
• Underwater server update
• Apple Vision Pro manufacturing cutback
• The confusing state of Apple Intelligence
• Anthropic’s latest AI update can use a computer on its own

Fire Starters:

• backdrop-filter

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - MacBook M3 Pro 16”
• TJ - The Will of the Many & corn mazes 🌽

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

In the new frameworks based on React, we introduce you to One. It is a Vite-powered project claiming to support React web apps and React Native apps all in one.

Next, Host Jack Herrington shares an update on how Astro’s Server Islands work after trying them out for himself. Similar to React’s Suspense components, Astro’s Server Islands allow any component that relies on server data to render with a “fallback” (like a loader or skeleton component) in the browser until the data is returned and the full HTML can render.

And as we cannot go a week without talking about the latest WordPress and WP Engine drama (listen to our last 3 episodes for full details), the latest kerfuffle involves WordPress seizing control of one of WP Engine’s most popular plugins hosted on the WordPress Plugin Directory and pushing a forked version of the plugin that WordPress is in control of under the same name.

News:

• Paige - One, the new React framework built on Vite
• Jack - Astro Server Islands (take 2)
• TJ - WordPress starts taking over WP Engine plugins

Bonus News:

• Google inks nuclear deal for next-generation reactors
• Express 5 and Zustand 5

Fire Starters:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Trying new things: like a voiceover workshop
• Jack - Hue smart plugs
• TJ - Only Murders in the Building season 4

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

.io domains have been in vogue for over a decade, but now that the British government has decided to give up sovereignty over the small set of islands in the Indian Ocean that owned that country code on the Internet, it will soon cease to exist. 

Evan You, of Vue JS and Vite fame, has started a new company VoidZero Inc. to build the next generation toolchain for JavaScript. While trying to make Vite even better, Evan realized he needed a full-time team and funding to build the best toolchain around, and the engineers and investors agreed.

StackBlitz enters the AI arena as well with its bolt.new offering, AI-powered software development allowing users to prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web apps directly in the browser.

WordPress drama reaches new levels of pettiness with a new checkbox that users must check before signing into their WP accounts swearing they are not affiliated with WP Engine in any way. In happier news, Sentry doubles down on its support for open source software (and the maintainers) by creating the Open Source Pledge where companies who use OSS for profit are encouraged to commit to paying the maintainers of the software they use so that burnout and related security issues can be better addressed.

News:

• Paige - void(0) JavaScript tooling
• Jack - StackBlitz’s Bolt.new AI dev tool
• TJ - The end of .io domains

Bonus News:

• Waymo update
• WordPress update
• Sentry launches the Open Source Pledge
• Sentry itself gave $500k to OS maintainers this year
• Deno 2 is officially out!

Fire Starters:

• HTTP QUERY

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power season 2
• Jack - The Substance movie
• TJ - Cider mills

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