🎉 Happy New Year! This is the very first issue of Frontend Focus for 2026, but if you’re still feeling a touch reflective, our previous issue looked back over the most popular links shared throughout 2025 — you can see that here if you missed it. With that, let’s get into this week’s issue. __ Your editor, Chris Brandrick
Introducing CSS Grid Lanes — You may remember a lot of chatter last year about how best to achieve Masonry layouts in CSS. Well, an approach has now been agreed upon, and it’s called Grid Lanes (display: grid-lanes;). There are still a few minor details to iron out, but the feature is ready for testing (in Safari Technology Preview right now) as explained …
🎉 Happy New Year! This is the very first issue of Frontend Focus for 2026, but if you’re still feeling a touch reflective, our previous issue looked back over the most popular links shared throughout 2025 — you can see that here if you missed it. With that, let’s get into this week’s issue. __ Your editor, Chris Brandrick
Introducing CSS Grid Lanes — You may remember a lot of chatter last year about how best to achieve Masonry layouts in CSS. Well, an approach has now been agreed upon, and it’s called Grid Lanes (display: grid-lanes;). There are still a few minor details to iron out, but the feature is ready for testing (in Safari Technology Preview right now) as explained in excellent detail here. A new one to commit to memory!
Simmons, Etemad, & Stewart (WebKit)
How to Stop Bots from Abusing Free Trials — Bots exploit trial signups and drain compute. WorkOS Radar uses device fingerprinting, traffic analysis, and behavioral signals to detect and block abuse in real time while integrating cleanly with your existing auth flow through a simple API.
WorkOS
🗳️ The Results: State of HTML 2025 — Reflections on the year that was. The conclusion highlights how developer interest seems firmly grounded in using practical and functional features over the more fanciful offerings. Plus, any pain points highlighted in the survey results are noted as thankfully being actively worked on. It’s a good snapshot of where HTML sits today, and always makes for an interesting read.
Devographics
⚡️ IN BRIEF
💭 Long-time Googler Addy Osmani has shared 21 lessons from his 14 years with the company.
😀 Patrick Brosset reminds us to have fun and experiment with the ‘amazingly playful’ web platform.
🖼️ Did you know you can get your GitHub profile pic by adding .png to your profile page? Thanks for the heads up Cassidy!
👎 Author and WordPress expert Jeff Starr recounts an unfortunate copyright roadblock he faced with Google Search. Plenty of chatter on Hacker News too.
📙 Articles, Opinions & Tutorials
Directional CSS with Scroll-State (Scrolled) — Una takes a look at the new scroll-state() query and how it lets us apply styles based on scroll directions. Unlocks some interesting possibilities, as the demos here show.
Una Kravets
Useful Patterns for Building HTML Tools — In many situations, you don’t need a full-on framework to build useful tools – just HTML, JavaScript and CSS in a single file will do the job. Simon’s become a bit of an expert by rolling out many such tools and shares his process and practices here. More please!
Simon Willison
A Minimal CSS Starter — Jens doesn’t use a CSS reset, but they do reach for a handful of properties with each project. Here’s a quick look at what those properties/values are and how they help.
Jens Oliver Meiert
🧰 Tools, Code & Resources
color.js Release v0.6.0 — The wildly popular (over 100 million downloads) standards-compliant color conversion and manipulation library marches on to its eventual 1.0 release.
Lea Verou
safe-npm: Safely Install NPM Packages — Works by reading your dependencies and only installing package versions that have been publicly available for a specified amount of time (90 days is the default).
Kevin Lin
📰 Classifieds
⚡️Add lightning-fast barcode & QR scanning to your web app with STRICH, a lean JS library. Simple, predictable pricing. Free trial and demo!