Idriss Douiri 
It’s the beginning of 2025, so here is a recap of what you might have missed in December 2024.
React 19 is Officially Stable
On 5th December, React 19 finally became stable. It brings new features such as server components. And better form handling with form actions, and these new hooks:
useFormStatusto get the last form submission status, such as the pending state.useActionStateto update a state variable based on form submissions, think of it as useState, but for form actions.UseOptimisticto update the UI optimistically before getting a server response.
[Related]: learn more about form handling in React 19.
Astro 5.1
On December 19. Astro introduces its first minor update after v5, which adds experimental session support to store user state between SSR pages. Improving caching for remote images, and a new helper to action paths getActionPath().
CSS Baseline Newly Available Features
With the release of Safari 18.2 on December 11, some new CSS Features are now supported by all major browsers. These features include:
scrollbar-gutterandscrollbar-widthto simplify scrollbar styling.::target-textpseudo-element for styling highlighted text from the URL.@pageat-rule to modify different aspects of printed pages.ruby-alignandruby-positionto control the alignment and the position of ruby elements.
The State Of JavaScript Survey
On December 16, the results of the state of javaScript 2024 came out, and it seems that everyone wants native support for static types. Here are some key insights:
Features:
- Nullish Coalescing and dynamic imports are the most used syntax features.
- replaceAll is the most used string method.
- array.toSorted() is the most used array method.
- Promise.allSettled() is the most async feature used.
Libraries:
- Reactjs is still the most used front-end library.
- Astro has a positive sentiment from the majority of developers.
- Vitest is the most loved testing tool.
- Vite is the most loved build tool while Webpack is the most hated one.
Google’s December Core Update
Google launched its fourth and final Algorithm Core Update for the year, completed on December 18. This update aims to enhance the quality of search results and provide helpful information to the searcher.
As always many websites gained traffic after this update and others got hit.
Zen Browser
The browser war is still ongoing. On December 10, Zen browser, the free and open-source fork of Mozilla Firefox launched its beta release.
Zen Browser has features similar to Arc, like split view and side tabs. But unlike Arc, Zen Browser doesn’t require you to sign up to use the app, it is available on all platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux), highly customizable, and secure.
Ghostty 1.0
The new terminal emulator Ghostty which everyone is hyped about, got its first stable release, available on macOS and Linux for now.
Ghostty aims to replace your current terminal emulator, with its zero-configuration philosophy, and various features including: tabs, splits, image rendering, and more.
