Monthly learnings and discoveries related to frontend, the web, and software engineering in general.

• Mozilla’s (formerly Google’s) Jake Archibald joins the Syntax podcast to discuss web standards, how they make their way into Firefox, and what else is coming to the web platform.

• How to favicon in 2026: A practical guide on what you actually need to support all the different places where an icon might show up (tabs, home screens, bookmarks).

• The next major version of npm, v12, will make some breaking changes to improve security. Similar to pnpm, it will disable the execution of install scripts and the resolution of Git dependencies by default.

• A look at the fundamentals and developer experience of the upcoming CSS @function rule. It comes with some really interesting additions, but also quite a few gotchas.

• What was Baseline Newly Available in May? Highlights include the :open CSS pseudo-class, container style queries, and name-only container queries.

• Apple held its annual developer conference, and there were several web technology sessions at WWDC 2026 worth catching up on. Check them out to learn what’s coming to Safari with the new OS versions, including grid lanes, customizable selects, and more.

• If you’re rebasing a branch and find yourself resolving the same conflict again and again, Git’s reuse recorded resolution (rerere) feature can make your life easier.

• VoidZero is joining Cloudflare. While the tools (like Vite) will remain open source and community-driven, Cloudflare is likely to build a brand-new full-stack framework heavily optimized for agents.

• Anders Hejlsberg—co-creator of TypeScript, C#, and Turbo Pascal—sits down with the Pragmatic Engineer podcast to talk about his career, language design, and the future of programming with AI.

• Bryan Cantrill on the peril of laziness lost:

LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time […] Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better […] The best engineering is always borne of constraints, and the constraint of our time places limits on the cognitive load of the system that we’re willing to accept. This is what drives us to make the system simpler, despite its essential complexity.

Notable releases:

• Apple Container 1.0, adding support for persistent Linux environments that integrate seamlessly with your local macOS setup.

• Astro 6.4 and Astro 7.0, upgrading to Vite 8, switching to a new, faster compiler and markdown parser, making the markdown rendering pipeline more customizable, and stabilizing the new routing API.

• Claude Fable 5.0, a new class of models from Anthropic, though they got shut down again in the meantime.

• Homebrew 6.0, the popular package manager for macOS, shipping with better defaults, a new trust mechanism for 3rd-party taps, sandboxing on Linux, and plenty of improvements to bundles.

• npm 11.16, adding initial opt-in support for the upcoming v12 breaking changes to help prepare for the transition.

• pnpm/setup@1, a streamlined GitHub Action for setting up both pnpm and the JavaScript runtime in GitHub pipelines.

• temporal-polyfill 1.0, going stable with tree shaking, shimming, reduced bundle size, and conformance with the latest version of the spec.