The current state of JavaScript on the Web

#​726 — March 7, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

A Report on How the Web is Really Using JavaScript— Each year, the HTTP Archive puts together the Web Almanac, a report on the ‘state of the Web’. The JavaScript section has just gone live and goes into depth on how much JS we’re using (or failing to use!), the popularity of TypeScript, loading methods, Web Worker use, and, yes, jQuery still leads the way!

HTTP Archive

Lynx: A Fresh Way to Build Apps from Web Technologies— Lynx is a new set of tools for building JavaScript-powered native and Web apps that draws inspiration from React Native but aims to be more modular and flexible (and eventually framework agnostic). It comes from, and is used by, TikTok, and comes with its own QuickJS-based JavaScript engine.

Xuan Huang and the Lynx Team

Build Dynamic Forms with a JSON-Powered White-Label Form Builder— Create fully customizable, JSON-driven forms in your JavaScript app with SurveyJS. Our drag-and-drop form-building UI component integrates seamlessly with React, Angular, Vue 3, and vanilla JS, plus has no backend restrictions. Perfect for form-heavy apps.

SurveyJS sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 5.8— Four months in the making, TypeScript 5.8 lands with a strong Node focus. You can now use require() for ES modules in the nodenext module, there’s a new node18 module for developers who want to keep targeting Node 18, and most notably there’s now an --erasableSyntaxOnly option to ensure no TypeScript-only runtime semantics can be used.

Microsoft

IN BRIEF:

• The Svelte team shares its latest monthly update of what's new.

• Straightforward examples of basic design patterns implemented in pure JavaScript.

• 🤖 The folks behind the State of JS survey are running State of Web Dev AI, a new survey focused on the use of AI in modern Web development.

RELEASES:

• Electron 35.0– You can now attach a preload script to Service Workers. Dependencies are also bumped to Chromium 134 and Node 22.14.

• Angular 19.2– We mentioned this last week but there's now an official post with more details.

• React Aria March Release– Adobe's fantastic suite of React components.

• zx 8.4– Google's tool for better Node shell scripting.

• eslint-plugin-vue v10.0.0, Readability.js 0.6, NodeBB 4.1

📒 Articles & Tutorials

JavaScript Fatigue Strikes Back— A developer with ‘a decade away’ from writing JavaScript returns to find that one thing hasn’t changed: “Choosing the right JavaScript framework is hard, man.”

Allen Pike

Dr. Axel's 'Sales Pitch' for TypeScript— As one of JavaScript’s most esteemed writers, if Dr. Axel can’t convince you of the value of TypeScript, who could?

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Instrument, Monitor, Fix: A Hands-On Debugging Class— Join us for a hands-on session where you’ll build it, watch it break, debug it, and go from “no idea what’s wrong” to fixing issues.

Sentry sponsor

Reimplementing Crossy Road in JavaScript— Two well put together tutorials so far covering reimplementing Crossy Road with either Three.js or React Three Fiber. In both written or video form.

Hunor Márton Borbély

Node Just Added TypeScript Support. What Does That Mean for Deno?— The Deno team, who went all in on TypeScript from day one, reflects on the continued increase in levels of support for TypeScript in Node and how their approaches differ.

Andy Jiang and Ryan Dahl

📄 Creating an Image Comparison Slider in 6 Lines of JavaScriptMuffin Man

📄 Is Biome Ready to Replace Prettier and ESLint?Nicolas Pendon

📄 Speeding Up the JS Ecosystem with Rust and JavaScript PluginsMarvin Hagemeister

📄 JavaScript Best Practice: Use return awaitTamás Sallai

🛠 Code & Tools

TanStack Form v1.0: Headless, Type-Safe Form State Management— A type-safe, framework agnostic (React, Vue, Angular, Solid and Lit are all supported out of the box), headless and isomorphic way to create and work with forms, with this v1.0 release over two years in the making. If you already use things like Formik or React Hook Form and are wondering how it differs, here’s a comparison table.

Tanner Linsley

PDFSlick 2.2: View and Interact with PDF Documents— A full-featured PDF viewer for React, Solid, Svelte and other JS apps. Built on top of PDF.js, it uses Zustand to provide a reactive store for documents. Demo.

Vancho Stojkov

🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time— WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting — stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

Electron App Boilerplate with Modern Dependencies— A basic template app that uses React 19, Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui, Electron Vite, Biome, and includes a GitHub Actions release workflow.

Dalton Menezes

Fable: A F# to JavaScript Compiler— If you fancy F#’s flavor of almost-entirely-functional development, this could be for you. GitHub repo.

Fable

React Data Table: Responsive Dynamic Table Component— Simple and clean, but flexible. Includes features like column sorting and pagination out of the box. Lots of demos and code examples. GitHub repo.

John Betancur

• 🖼️ Cropper.js 2.0– JavaScript image cropping control. There's an online playground where you get a feel for all its features.

• 📈 Perspective 3.4– Streaming data viz and analytics component. The core is written in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly. The homepage shows it off well.

• Happy DOM 17.3– Cross-runtime JS implementation of a web browser sans UI.

• EasyMDE 2.20– A simple Markdown editor control. Demo.

• LogTape 0.9– Simple logging library for all major JS runtimes.

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of some of other interesting updates or useful resources in the broader developer landscape:

• 🗓️ endoflife.date is a handy, updated source of 'end-of-life' dates for hundreds of open source projects, including Angular, Node.js, and Vue. A great resource.

• Dive into WebGPU is a fantastic four part series on using the Web's most modern graphics API for creating striking visual effects.

• FerretDB 2.0 is an interesting open source MongoDB alternative built on top of Postgres.

• A look at initial support for functions in CSS. Currently an experimental Chrome Canary feature only.