Baseline's biggest month yet

May 2025 was the busiest month for Baseline so far this year, headlined by a strong showing at Google I/O. Beyond the conference, the project picked up momentum with new tooling, documentation, and IDE integrations.

I/O highlights

Baseline featured prominently across Google I/O, including the developer keynote, the web stage, Q&A sessions, and a live coding demo. Here's what stood out.

What's new in web

Rachel Andrew's web stage session offered a quick overview of Baseline, covered features that are now Baseline Newly available, and highlighted the accelerating pace of web platform evolution. It's a solid primer for anyone new to Baseline.

VS Code ships Baseline support

A notable tooling milestone: Visual Studio Code now includes Baseline support for CSS and HTML features in its standard build. No extension install required. The capability is built in, and the announcement post has the details.

Baseline in your toolchain

Jeremy Wagner's web stage talk covered integrating Baseline into a development workflow, starting with how Baseline works, then moving to Baseline targets and applying one via the browserslist-config-baseline package. The demo showed setup in Vite, Babel, and PostCSS.

The session wasn't recorded, but a codelab version is planned for self-paced follow-along.

Feature status updates

CSS font-palette became Baseline Widely available this month. Also worth noting: JSON import attributes became Baseline Newly available back in April, meaning JSON files can now be imported as modules across all browsers.

Choosing a Baseline target

Jeremy Wagner and Rachel Andrew published a guide on selecting a Baseline target for a project. Targets come in two flavors: fixed targets grouped by year from the current year back to 2016, and moving targets that track Newly and Widely available features. The full article is available at How to choose your Baseline target.

Enforcing targets with Browserslist

Tony Conway's browserslist-config-baseline npm package is the bridge between picking a target and enforcing it. It scopes a project's Browserslist config to the chosen Baseline target, which makes it directly usable in any toolchain that already relies on Browserslist. See Use Baseline with Browserslist for setup details.

Netlify extension

Knowing your audience's feature support is critical when choosing a Baseline target. Tools like RUMvision or the Google Analytics Baseline Checker can help. For Netlify users, there's now a quick-install extension that surfaces this information after a data collection period. The announcement post explains how to use it.

Web Platform Dashboard updates

The Web Platform Dashboard received updates that surface new compatibility information for web platform features, including Baseline status. The details are covered in the update post.

IDE and social updates

WebStorm has expanded its Baseline support in the pre-release build to include hovercards for JavaScript features. The capability is not yet in the stable release, but is expected to land there soon.

For those on Bluesky, a Baseline bot is now posting updates when features reach Baseline status.

If we missed any Baseline-related news this month, let us know via the issue tracker and it will be included in a future digest.