Discover some of the interesting features that have landed in stable and beta
web browsers during January 2025.
Published: January 29, 2025
Stable browser releases
In January 2025 Firefox 134,
Safari 18.3, and
Chrome 132 became stable.
This post looks at the new features added to the web platform.
Promise.try is now Baseline Newly available
Promise.try is a convenience method that makes error handling for synchronous
callback functions easier. It’s available from Firefox 134, making it Baseline
Newly available. Learn more in
Promise.try is now Baseline Newly available.
CSS alignment properties for absolute positioned elements
Also in Firefox 134, the align-self and justify-self CSS properties
along with the place-self CSS shorthand property are now supported for
absolutely positioned elements.
CSS sideways writing modes
Support of sideways-rl and sideways-lr keywords for the writing-mode CSS property have been added to Chrome 132. The sideways-rl and sideways-lr are helpful to write non-CJK text vertically,
when you want to display vertical text for design purposes.
Fixes to mobile support for popover
Safari 18.3 is a release fixing various interoperability issues.
A key issue is a fix for popover.
Previously, touching or clicking outside of the popover failed to close it on iOS and iPadOS.
This has now been fixed.
Request.bytes() and Response.bytes() are Baseline Newly available
Chrome 132 adds a bytes() method to the Request and Response interfaces of Fetch,
which returns a promise that resolves with a Uint8Array.
While Request and Response have an arrayBuffer() method,
you can’t read directly from a buffer.
You have to create a view such as a Uint8Array to read it.
The bytes() method improves the ergonomics of getting the body of
Request and Response.
Device Posture API
Chrome 132 includes the Device Posture API,
designed to help when designing for foldable screens.
This implementation includes a new device-posture CSS media feature that
can be used to detect the device’s current posture. It also includes a
JavaScript interface to detect and react to changes in posture.
Postures are defined as:
continuous: Indicates a flat screen—this can include a foldable device while it is being used flat, and flat or curved screens.folded: Indicates a folded screen—this can include a foldable device being used in a book or laptop posture.
WebAuthn Signal API
Chrome 132 also includes the WebAuthn Signal API
which Allows WebAuthn relying parties to signal information about existing credentials back to credential storage providers, so that incorrect or revoked credentials can be updated or removed from provider and system UI.
Learn more about the
Signal API for passkeys on Chrome desktop.
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 135
and Chrome 133.
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.
Chrome 133 is an exciting release for CSS. It includes the
advanced attr() function,
scroll state container queries, and
CSS text-box, text-box-trim, and text-box-edge.
Chrome 133 also includes the
FileSystemObserver interface,
and a DOM primitive (Node.prototype.moveBefore) that lets you move elements around a DOM tree, without resetting the element’s state.
Firefox 135 includes the
JSON parse with source proposal,
which aims to provide features to mitigate issues around loss of precision when converting values such as large floats and date values between JavaScript values and JSON text.
