Bleeding Edge Web

Bleeding Edge Web: February 2015

News from the Bleeding Edge

— Brian Moeskau (@bmoeskau)

http://edgeATX.github.io/slides

Typescript Deep Dive

— Ted Patrick (@__ted__)

http://light.ly

http://code.tedpatrick.com/typescript/

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News from the
Bleeding Edge

What Is Bleeding Edge Web?

A monthly-ish update of the latest and greatest in:

Browser news
W3C standards updates
Interesting language & framework releases
Emphasis on JavaScript and Node

Anything else that might be interesting to web app devs!

Browser Update

Browser Pop Quiz

Last version check — January 2015 (last month):


40	35	27	8	11

Browser Pop Quiz

As of February 24, 2015:


40	35 36	27	8	11

Chrome Highlights

Version 41 (beta)

Phasing out support for SHA-1 / 1024-bit SSL certificates

Firefox Highlights

Version 36

Full support for HTTP/2 protocol
Support for unicode-range for @font-face subsets
(Firefox was the last major holdout – even IE9+ supports it)
More new HTML5 CSS features:
object-fit, object-position, will-change, scroll-behavior

Sidebar: HTTP/2

http://http2.github.io/faq/

New version of HTTP, mainly focused on improving page load performance

Based on SPDY from Google

Binary rather than textual
Multiplexed, not ordered/blocking
Single connection can load multiple resources in parallel
Header compression reduces overhead
Servers can proactively "push" data to client cache

Firefox Highlights

Version 36

Phasing out support for SHA-1 / 1024-bit SSL certificates
Improved ES 6 const support
Support for Symbol and other ES Next additions
DOM Promises inspection:

Do You Use SSL?

SHA-1 Phase Out

Process has already started in Chrome and Firefox

Microsoft plans to withdraw support in Windows by 2017

SHA-1 first published in 1995
Viable attacks proposed since 2005 (still theoretical)
SHA-2 uses much longer hashes (224-512 bits vs 160)
SHA-3 in the works

SHA-1 SSL certificates should be replaced ASAP to avoid this:

Opera

Expect version 28 after Chrome 41 ships

Safari & IE

Security updates

Forgetting Anything?

Project Spartan

Holy crap, a new browser! From Microsoft!

Announced Jan 21 – will ship with Windows 10

User features:

First-class mobile / touch support
Cortana (voice command) integration
Web page annotation support

Project Spartan

New rendering engine (EdgeHTML.dll)
Ignores legacy document modes (X-UA-Compatible)
Loads IE 11 engine (Trident) for "enterprise legacy apps"
Both engines will ship in IE also
Self-updating ("evergreen")
Extensive ES 6 support, tons of new APIs
Too many features to list

Project Spartan

Interesting context from a member of the MS browser team

On forking Trident:

It took almost 45 minutes just to process [the commit] (just committing the changes, not building!)...

In the coming months, swathes of IE legacy were deleted from the new engine. Gone were document modes. Removed was the subsystem responsible for emulating IE8 layout quirks. VBScript eliminated. Remnants like attachEvent, X-UA-Compatible, currentStyle were all purged from the new engine. The codebase looks little like Trident anymore (far more diverged already than even Blink is from WebKit).