#​781 — April 14, 2026

Read on the Web
Together with  Expo

JavaScript Weekly

Under the Hood of MDN's New Frontend — The hugely useful MDN has rebuilt its frontend stack from the ground up, ditching React for web components and a homegrown server component system. A great read on building a modern, content-heavy site without shipping unnecessary JavaScript on every page.

Leo McArdle (MDN)

Ship Mobile Apps The Way You Ship Websites — Expo gives JavaScript developers a web-like workflow for native mobile. Hot reload on device. OTA updates that skip app store review. Cloud builds that work like Vercel. Start with npx create-expo-app.

Expo sponsor

🕹️ Phaser 4.0: The 2D WebGL and Canvas-Based Game Framework — The widely used game framework celebrates its 13th birthday with a major release focused on perf/efficiency improvements, and includes skills files so AI agents can build Phaser 4.0 apps well. There are lots of demos, including these games, and existing users get a v3 to v4 migration guide.

Phaser Studio Inc.

IN BRIEF:

RELEASES:

📖  Articles and Videos

Installing Every Firefox Extension — One person’s entertaining and heroic tale of wielding JavaScript to explore the Firefox extension ecosystem. And what oddities there are within! I enjoyed this a lot, it’s like Alice in Wonderland for developers. More spelunking like this please.

Jack Cab

Uses for Nested Promises — James revisits 2013's Promises/A+ monads debate and has changed his mind, thanks to a real concurrency problem he ran into. Demanding but rewarding.

James Coglan

44 Postgres Talks To Choose From All in One Free, Virtual Event — Join POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026, a free & virtual Postgres developer event, 16–18 Jun. Check out the schedule.

Microsoft | AMD sponsor

You Can't Cancel a Promise (Except Sometimes You Can) — You can’t cancel a promise, but you can halt an async function by making it await a promise that never resolves. The function silently stops, and GC cleans up after it.

Aaron Harper (Inngest)

Parse, Don't Validate (In a Language That Doesn't Want You To) — Tired of writing the same defensive if check in multiple files because you can’t trust that validation already happened? Branded types and discriminated unions can let TypeScript carry that proof for you.

Christian Ekrem

🌐 The Intl API: The Best Browser API You’re Not Using — A neat code-heavy primer to what you can do with Intl.

Kilian Valkhof

📄 Making Our Frontend Unit Tests Much Faster with @swc/jest – From 15 seconds with Jest to 4 seconds with the compatible @swc/jest. Sebastian Herrmann

📄 Creating Custom Page Transitions in Astro with Barba.js and GSAP Iqbal Muthahhary (Codrops)

📄 The Uphill Climb of Making Diff Lines Performant on GitHub Ghenco and Shwert (GitHub)

📄 Building a JavaScript Runtime with QuickJS Andrew Healey

🛠 Code & Tools

Boneyard: Auto-Generated Skeleton Screens for Your UI — Snapshots your real UI and captures a flat list of skeleton ‘bones’ which are positioned, sized rectangles that mirror the page exactly. Supports React, Preact, React Native, Vue, Svelte, and Angular.

0xGF

📈 Micro-ML: A Toolkit of Forecasting and Clustering Algorithms — A ~56KB WASM-powered library with algorithms for regression and smoothing. Cluster points, classify data, or predict the next value in a series without dragging in TensorFlow.js.

Adam Perliński

AI Writes Code. Wallaby MCP Makes Sure It Actually Works — Give your AI agent live execution data, coverage, and real-time insights to generate tests and code with confidence.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Ink 7.0: Use React to Build TUIs and Command Line Apps — Powering many popular terminal apps, v7.0 now leans on React 19.2, uses useEffectEvent internally for added efficiency, and brings new hooks and settings.

Vadim Demedes

🔊 web-audio-api: Use the Web Audio API from Node and Bun — Full Web Audio API support to either play audio on your machine/server or render it to file (and, yes, Tone.js works too). There are many examples to enjoy.

Sébastien Piquemal

Syncpack: Consistent Dependency Versions in Large JS Monorepos — A CLI tool (used by Electron, Cloudflare, Vercel and others) that finds version mismatches across your entire monorepo, fixes them, and can enforce version policies in CI to avoid future drift.

Jamie Mason

  • Mantine 9.0 – The wildly popular React component suite now includes a complete set of calendar scheduling components.

  • wa-sqlite 1.1 – WebAssembly build of SQLite enabling JavaScript-based virtual filesystems and browser storage extensions. (Demo.)

  • gridstack.js 12.6 – Build responsive drag-and-drop multi-column dashboards.

  • Formula.js 4.6 – Excel's formula functions, but for JavaScript.

  • Lexical 0.43 – Facebook's extensible text editor framework.

📰 Classifieds

Flaky tests slowing down dev? Meticulous gives engineers confidence to ship faster by autonomously testing every edge case of your web app.

Manage SAML and OIDC enterprise connections via Clerk's Backend API. One unified endpoint for both protocols.

⚡Nimbalyst: Visual workspace for building with Claude Code & Codex. Integrate and manage sessions, tasks & files. Visually edit markdown, mockups, diagrams, code.

Gauntlet AI Night School | Cursor, Claude Code, or agents — how AI-first engineers choose the right tool for production. (Virtual - 4/15)

📢  Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Windows 95 as an Electron App — A full Windows 95 experience as an app on macOS, Linux, and Windows, built upon the v86 JavaScript + WASM emulator. v5.0 is a big release as you can mount a folder from your machine into it as a Z: drive, mount ISOs as CD-ROMs, there’s a shared clipboard, and Internet access has been improved. I’m so trying to get Microsoft Encarta’s Mindmaze running on this…

Felix Rieseberg