New to the web platform in November  |  Blog  |  web.dev

Discover some of the interesting features that have landed in stable and beta
web browsers during November 2024.

Published: November 27, 2024

Stable browser releases

In November 2024, Firefox
131 and
Chrome 131 became stable. This
post looks at the new features added to the web platform.

WebCodecs API

Firefox 133 supports the ImageDecoder, ImageTrackList, and ImageTrack
interfaces of the
WebCodecs API,
enabling the decoding images from the main and worker threads.

The WorkerNavigator permissions property

Firefox 133 also supports
WorkerNavigator.permissions.

@page margin boxes

Chrome 131 adds support for page margin boxes, when printing a web document,
or exporting it as PDF.

The @page margin boxes let you define the contents in the margin area of a
page, for example to provide custom headers and footers,
rather than using the built-in headers and footers generated by the browser.

Counters are also supported, for page numbering.
The specification defines two special counter names:
page for the current page number and pages for the total number of pages.

Learn more in
Add content to the margins of pages printed using CSS.

Support for currentcolor in relative color syntax

Chrome 131 allows relative colors in CSS (using the from keyword) to use
currentcolor as a base. This lets you set complementary colors,
based on an element’s text color, for that element’s borders, shadows,
or backgrounds.

Uint8Array methods

Firefox 133 adds a number of new Uint8Array methods to ease conversions
between base64- and hex-encoded strings and byte arrays:

• Uint8Array.fromBase64() and Uint8Array.fromHex()
• Uint8Array.prototype.setFromBase64() and Uint8Array.prototype.setFromHex()
• Uint8Array.prototype.toBase64() and Uint8Array.prototype.toHex()

WebHID on dedicated workers

Chrome 131 enables WebHID inside dedicated worker contexts.
This lets you perform heavy I/O and processing of data from a HID device on a
separate thread, helping to reduce the performance impact on the main thread.

Beta browser releases

Beta browser versions give you a preview of things that will be in the next
stable version of the browser. It’s a great time to test new features, or
removals, that could impact your site before the world gets that release. New
betas are Firefox 134,
Safari 18.2,
and
Chrome 132.
These releases bring many great features to the platform.
Check out the release notes for all of the details. Here are just a few
highlights.

Safari 18.2 includes the Uint8Array methods, mentioned earlier in this post as
shipping in Firefox, and the @page margin descriptors that shipped in Chrome
this month.
There’s a good list of new CSS features, including support for
cross-document view transitions, ruby-align, and text-box-trim.

Chrome 132 includes support of sideways-rl and sideways-lr keywords for
the writing-mode CSS property, toggle events for <dialog>, and
a bytes() method for the Request and Response interfaces.

Firefox 134 is light on details right now, however it looks to include
Promise.try which is also in the Safari 18.2 beta.