The CSS Roundup: What’s New Before the New Year

As 2026 approaches, here’s a look at the most interesting CSS developments and community highlights from the past couple of weeks.

Conditional View Transitions

Chris Coyier recently demonstrated how to trigger different view transitions based on the URL or any custom JavaScript logic. However, commenter Bramus noted that navigation matching is coming natively to CSS, which could eventually eliminate the need for JavaScript in these scenarios.

Accessibility Annotations for Design Systems

Geri Reid published a detailed guide on how to annotate design system components for accessibility, complete with solid HTML-based examples. The approach includes treating elements, ARIA, markup, keyboard navigation, zoom, and user preferences as accessibility tokens.

Firefox’s AI Shift and the Rise of Waterfox

Mozilla’s new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, stated in an interview that Firefox “will evolve into a modern AI browser.” With only 2.3% of the browser market share, the pivot may be an attempt to stay relevant, but user reaction has been largely negative. In response, Mozilla has announced an AI kill switch to let users opt out.

This controversy has driven attention to Waterfox, a no-AI fork of Firefox.

Recreating ‘Toon Text with CSS and SVG

Andy Clarke showed how to create the classic text effects from animated cartoons using CSS and SVG. One notable discovery is the paint-order CSS property, which proves particularly useful for these effects.

2025’s Must-Know CSS Features

Adam Argyle outlined the six CSS features front-end developers should master in 2025. With the year ending, many developers admit they haven’t fully explored some of these — particularly the @property rule.

CSS Highlights from Bluesky

Despite the broader social media landscape, Bluesky has fostered a strong developer community. Here are some standout CSS posts from the past weeks:

  • Temani Afif shared a demo combining anchor positioning, attr(), container queries, and shape(). The arrow’s shape and position are fully CSS-controlled, including collision detection.
  • Stephen Margheim argued for namespace-prefixing semantic classes, like renaming .btn to .ui-button, explaining why such naming conventions matter.
  • Ana Tudor posted displacement map text effects that go beyond simple shrinking or expansion, enabling rotation, 3D effects, and lens-like bubbling without splitting text.
  • George Black joked about the pain of using modern CSS features available in only one browser, highlighting the ongoing need for cross-browser consistency.
  • Sunkanmi Fafowora publicly thanked CSS contributors for their work, recognizing the effort that expands what’s possible in the language.

Interop 2026: Addressing Cross-Browser Issues

George’s comment touches on a real challenge, but the Interop Project — a collaboration between Chrome, Firefox, and Safari — aims to fix it. The project focuses on making certain features work consistently across all browsers, and you can vote in the proposals for Interop 2026.