<p><strong>TLDR:</strong> VoidZero launched Void, a Vite-native deployment platform, and made Vite+ fully open-source under MIT as a result. Pinterest replaced a 2,000-line JavaScript carousel with 200 lines of native CSS and saw real engagement gains. Next.js 16.2 ships agent-native features including bundled docs and a purpose-built browser debugging tool. The State of JavaScript 2025 survey confirms TypeScript exclusivity is up to 40% and Vite has effectively lapped Webpack in satisfaction.</p>
<hr>
<h2>Vite+ goes MIT after VoidZero launches Void platform</h2>
<p>VoidZero launched Void, a Vite-native deployment platform built on Cloudflare Workers, and as part of that move made Vite+ fully open-source under MIT. The Vite+ alpha bundles Vite, Vitest, Oxlint, Oxfmt, Rolldown, and tsdown into a single binary (<code>vp</code>) covering the full local dev lifecycle — env management, package installation, linting, formatting, type-checking, and building. There’s also a built-in task runner with input fingerprinting for caching. Worth watching closely if you’re tired of stitching together separate tools for each of those jobs.</p>
<h2>Pinterest replaced 2,000 lines of carousel JS with 200 lines of CSS</h2>
<p>Pinterest’s close-up experience team migrated a JavaScript carousel to native CSS, cutting code by 90% and improving page load time by 15%. The migration eliminated main-thread blocking and removed jank, and A/B testing showed measurable engagement gains — enough that they rolled it out across home feed, search, and boards. They also explored CSS view transitions as a lightweight alternative to animation libraries. This is a good concrete data point for anyone still defending a JS-heavy carousel in 2026.</p>
<h2>Next.js 16.2 ships agent-native features</h2>
<p>Next.js 16.2 adds <a href="http://AGENTS.md" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">AGENTS.md</a> and bundled docs so AI coding agents have deep knowledge of the exact framework version in use, rather than hallucinating against stale training data. A new <code>@vercel/next-browser</code> package gives agents a purpose-built tool for debugging and optimizing frontends. Vercel says they validated this in production and agents shipped optimizations that expert engineers missed. That’s a strong claim — take it with appropriate skepticism, but the bundled docs approach is genuinely sensible regardless of how the agent story plays out.</p>
<h2>State of JavaScript 2025: TypeScript at 40%, Vite at 98% satisfaction</h2>
<p>The 2025 survey puts TypeScript exclusive usage at 40%, up from 34% last year. Vite sits at 98% satisfaction versus Webpack’s 26% — that gap is not closing. React holds at 83.6% usage but Next.js is drawing more criticism for complexity. On the AI tooling side, Claude doubled to 44% and Cursor more than doubled to 26%. Overall developer happiness is 3.8/5 for the fifth year running, which is either reassuring or a little depressing depending on your mood.</p>
<hr>
<h2>Also notable</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Claude Code DOM selection:</strong> Claude Code on desktop now lets you click a DOM element directly and sends the tag, classes, key styles, surrounding HTML, and a cropped screenshot — plus source file and props for React components. Small but genuinely useful.</li>
<li><strong>Google Stitch:</strong> Google added AI-native features to its Stitch UI design tool, including a design agent, parallel idea tracking via an Agent manager, voice critique, and MCP export for Cursor and Claude Code. Generates full UI from a single prompt.</li>
<li><strong>Rust WASM parser rewrite:</strong> A team rewrote a Rust/WASM DSL parser in TypeScript after discovering the bottleneck was WASM-JS boundary overhead, not computation. The rewrite yielded 2.2-4.6x faster per-call performance. Trying to skip JSON serialization via serde-wasm-bindgen made things 30% slower. Good reminder that WASM is for compute-bound work with minimal interop.</li>
<li><strong>The Great CSS Expansion:</strong> A detailed breakdown of modern CSS features replacing JS libraries — anchor positioning for Popper.js, Popover API for Radix overlays, scroll-driven animations for GSAP ScrollTrigger, view transitions for react-transition-group. Estimated savings of 44-322 kB minified+gzipped depending on usage.</li>
<li><strong>Chrome Canary text scaling:</strong> Chrome Canary is testing <code>&lt;meta name=text-scale&gt;</code> to respect system-level text size accessibility settings on mobile. Unlike page zoom, it only scales text. Currently, increasing system text size has no effect on web content in Chrome or Safari.</li>
<li><strong>ESLint v10.1.0:</strong> Bulk suppressions support is now available via API, not just CLI. Pass <code>applySuppressions: true</code> to the ESLint constructor. Also fixes a <code>no-var</code> autofix bug when a variable is used before its declaration.</li>
<li><strong>Vercel Composer 2:</strong> Lee Robinson confirmed Composer 2 started from an open-source model base, with about 75% of compute coming from Vercel’s own training runs. Full pretraining is planned for a future release.</li>
<li><strong>Dropdowns in scrollable containers:</strong> Smashing Magazine covers why z-index fixes fail and walks through four real solutions: DOM portals, fixed positioning with JS coordinates, CSS Anchor Positioning with position-try-fallbacks, and DOM restructuring. The HTML Popover API solves layering but not positioning on its own.</li>
<li><strong>LangChain React v0.2.0:</strong> First-class React Suspense support for AI chat UIs is coming, with a new <code>useSuspenseStream</code> hook.</li>
<li><strong>Solid 2.0 Beta:</strong> Ryan Carniato is doing a deep-dive session on Solid 2.0 Beta. A companion post covers the fine-grained reactivity model and the architectural principles behind the 2.0 release.</li>
</ul>


Frontend development news, CSS techniques, framework updates, and browser API changes.

WebDev Digest

A roundup of notable frontend and web tooling news: VoidZero made Vite+ fully open-source under MIT alongside launching Void, a Vite-native deployment platform on Cloudflare Workers. Pinterest replaced a 2,000-line JavaScript carousel with 200 lines of CSS, achieving 90% code reduction and 15% faster page loads with measurable engagement gains. Next.js 16.2 introduces agent-native features including bundled docs and a browser debugging tool for AI coding agents. The State of JavaScript 2025 survey shows TypeScript exclusive usage at 40%, Vite at 98% satisfaction vs Webpack's 26%, and Claude and Cursor both more than doubling in AI tooling adoption. Additional items cover Claude Code DOM selection, Google Stitch UI tool, a Rust/WASM-to-TypeScript parser rewrite, modern CSS replacing JS libraries, ESLint v10.1.0, and Solid 2.0 Beta.

Vite+ goes fully open-source, Pinterest drops 1,800 lines of carousel JS