January’s browser updates: stable releases
Chrome 97 and Firefox 96 both moved to stable in January, bringing a handful of CSS additions with them.
Firefox 96 introduced support for the hwb() color function, which defines colors using hue, whiteness, and blackness components. The same release also shipped the CSS color-scheme property, letting developers declare which color schemes an element supports. For example, you can indicate that a .widget should render in either the operating system’s light or dark mode:
.widget {
color-scheme: light dark;
}
With Firefox on board, color-scheme is now available across Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
What’s in beta
January’s beta releases—Chrome 98, Firefox 97, and Safari 15.4 Beta 1—offer an early look at features heading to stable browsers soon.
Chrome 98
Chrome 98 adds support for COLRv1 color gradient vector fonts, a new font format that stores glyphs with multiple colors, such as emoji, flags, or multi-colored letters. The beta also includes the structuredClone() method for deep-copying objects, plus the dynamic-range and video-dynamic-range CSS media queries. Chrome 98 DevTools gains a full accessibility tree view.
Firefox 97
Firefox 97 Beta implements the cap and ic length units and adds the scrollbar-gutter property.
Safari 15.4
Safari 15.4 Beta packs a larger set of features. It includes the ::backdrop pseudo-element, the :focus-visible pseudo-class, the accent-color property, and CSS containment via the contain property. On the HTML side, it brings the <dialog> element, the lazy attribute for browser-level image lazy-loading, and support for Web App Manifest icons.
