Philip Walton

📢 New post: The State of ES5 on the Web. For years, we defaulted to transpiling to ES5 in order to support IE. But is that still necessary? I took a look at the data to find out, and I'll just say that the results were *actually* quite surprising! 🙀 philipwalton.com/articles/the...

Modern Web Guidance v0.0.192 is out. With it your coding agent now knows how to: • build SMS one-time-code forms that autofill (WebOTP) • make dark mode toggles that follow the OS • honor the OS text size setting • reduce INP and lazy-load video/audio • feature-detect CSS at-rules with @supports

v0.0.191 of Modern Web Guidance is out and it's a big one! *16* new guides covering: web components by @castastrophe.bsky.social Cross-Origin Storage by @tomayac.com security by @rowan.fyi UI and PWA by @jamessw.com and @sturobson.com Wasm by @sbc100.bsky.social github.com/GoogleChrome...

Google started shipping ad metrics in CrUX overnight, so I’ve added them to Calibre's free Core Web Vitals tool. First look at the Independent: ads take up 20% of the screen, 7.25s of CPU and 5.1MB of data per page. 88% of their readers are on phones. calibreapp.com/tools/core-w...

We just launched experimental ad metrics in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX): - Ad Count - Ad Density - Ad Weight: Network - Ad Weight: CPU These metrics are a set of ad-related measurements that provide transparency into sites' ad experiences. developer.chrome.com/blog/crux-ad... 1/8 🧵

I've just release v6.0.0 of the web-vitals library. It includes support for measuring Web Vitals per soft navigation (like those used in SPAs) for supporting browsers (Chrome 151+) to give more accurate performance metrics for those sites. github.com/GoogleChrome...

Hi! I'm working on a new HTML feature: filterable select There are two proposed API shapes so far: 1. Nesting <input> in <select> 2. Sibling <input> for listbox <select> w/id ref Option 1 is more ergonomic, but would break selects in older browsers Thoughts? (Both currently in Canary w/flag)

🔥 New blog post: In defense of polyfills A highly influential spec editor expressed the opinion that polyfilling is harmful. I beg to differ. lea.verou.me/blog/2026/po...

Yeah, www.bram.us/2025/05/04/c... is the article Jakob's referring to. The post lists the difficulties (basically reiterating what @philipwalton.com said a decade ago), identifies the needs, and also explores a potential solution. I really wish we had something like it, for the better of the web.

Along with the laundry list of CSS features I didn't know had been knocking around for the last few years, I've just found that private JS properties are "widely available" baseline…since 2021. Apparently I just get older and slower 🐌

Solved: AI coding tools that hallucinate legacy web practices. Modern Web Guidance codifies decades of Chrome's platform expertise into your agents. Level up with guides for web best practices and new platform features, using Baseline data for cross-browser reliability → goo.gle/4on8BMS

My Google IO demo of HTML in Canvas and Web MCP github.com/PaulKinlan/3...

I really don't like to admit that, but agents are no longer bad at CSS. I'm playing around with these skills bundled by Googlers into the Modern Web Guidance, and they are impressive. Really good presentation @philipwalton.com 👏 developer.chrome.com/docs/modern-... #css

My talk on Modern Web Guidance is up! youtu.be/bo3i0FzDUYo This talk is a deep dive into how Modern Web Guidance works and why it's useful. 👉 Make sure you watch until the end, where I show some live demos that really highlight this tool's capabilities!

HTML might be getting out of order streaming natively in the future. I really like this: developer.chrome.com/blog/declara...

Here's the recording of this year's “What's new in Web UI” talk @una.im and I gave at Google I/O earlier this week. youtu.be/uT7MVcCQ4rw Very happy with how it went, and I think you might find it useful, so give it a watch 😊 #ChromeDevRel #GoogleIO

What's new in Web UI: 2026 Edition ✨ @bram.us and I go over 35+ new CSS, HTML, and JS features to help you build beautiful web experiences Video just went live: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT7M...

Pretty excited about the Modern Web Guidance skills from Google. I had already created my own "semantic HTML" skill, but these are much better. https://developer.chrome...

✨ A challenge in today's web dev is telling AI agents to write modern code. Skills can help avoid legacy patterns and bloated JS. 🎉 We're teaming up with Chrome to bring you Modern Web Guidance: skills for web platform expertise, best practices, and modern API patterns!

We've been COOKING Modern Web Guidance is a skill pack that helps your coding agent write better, faster, more accessible and secure code Get it at goo.gle/mwg We'd love to know what you think!

@philipwalton.com to discuss it in more detail in 30 mins! io.google/2026/explore...

Thrilled this is out, keeping quiet has been SO HARD! 🤐 I’ve had the opportunity to contribute as a domain expert consultant over the past few months, and saw firsthand the level of thoughtfulness and care that went into it. Proud to have played a small part, and excited to see what folks build! ❤️

💥 Game changer for Web Development announced at GoogleIO- Modern Web Guidance! It’s expert-vetted skills for web development based on best practices of latest specs and APIs. It ensures your agent/coding harness doesn’t default to older and out of date patterns to build sites.

I'm going to be giving a talk that deep dives into Modern Web Guidance in 2 hours: bsky.app/profile/deve... You can find the talk details here: io.google/2026/explore...

🚨 What are some modern web platform (CSS, HTML, JS) features that you wish your AI agent utilized, but doesn't (or gets them wrong)? I’ll go first: - CSS: lh unit, trig functions, nesting - HTML: inert attribute - JS: Regex lookbehind, regex named groups, RegExp.escape(), Object.groupBy()

TypeScript excitement 😉 Congrats to @jakebailey.dev on updating upstream tsc to default to an unpinned *latest* yearly edition of ES20xx. Heading for TS 6.0 🎉 This mean less transpilation of new JS features & more use of native language features provided by JS engines 👍 github.com/microsoft/Ty...

You know that annoying experience on mobile websites where you need to find the little close button and can't swipe a menu closed? The solution is simpler than you think. With basic CSS scroll APIs, you can get built-in interruptible swipe gestures 🥳

The Chrome Identity and Payments team in Waterloo Canada is hiring several early/mid-career developers. I'm on the lookout for exceptional candidates with a passion for browsers and/or the identity/payments space! www.linkedin.com/posts/rick-b...

Being an old-school web dev is always like "Oh wait, I *can* use container queries now"

There are many goodies that are newly and widely available in Baseline. backdrop-filter is so much fun to work with and I am obsessed with AVIF images and the ability to animate from display: none with @starting-style. And how easy is it to lazy load images now? web.dev/articles/bas...

View Transitions are now in all browsers! They also landed in React! developer.chrome.com/blog/view-tr...

Chrome for Android can now help users adopt passkeys more seamlessly. If a user signs in with a saved password , your website can request that an associated password manager (in many cases on Chrome is Google Password Manager) creates a passkey automatically. developer.chrome.com/blog/automat...

A lot has happened since Chrome shipped Same-Document View Transitions in 2023. In 2024 we shipped Cross-Document VTs, added refinements such as `view-transition-class` and VT Types, and also welcomed Safari in adding VT support. And this year … well, I wrote a post summing it all up.

If we started Chrome Dev Summit again, would you be interested in it? (huh - apparently can't do polls here...), Please reply, Yes or No, or any other answer in between.

✅ Baseline now has full feature coverage, making it easier to know which web platform features are ready to use. Build the next wave of Baseline-powered tools and compete for $10,000 in prizes → goo.gle/424SBWc

Announcing our public preview of Chrome DevTools MCP! Experience the full power of DevTools in your AI coding agent→ goo.gle/4pDE6Tk With Chrome DevTools MCP, your AI agent can run performance traces, inspect the DOM, & perform real-time debugging of your web pages.

Before, you needed a plugin to use Baseline semantics in your Browserslist queries. Now you don't! Just give it a target like `baseline widely available` and it'll work out of the box Available in browserslist@4.26.0 and later web.dev/blog/browser...

Show us your best tooling ideas to help developers adopt more modern web features! Join the hackathon for your shot at $10,000 in cash prizes 🔥🔥 web.dev/blog/baselin...

Scoped View Transitions are ready for testing in Chrome! SVTs expose el.startViewTransition() on HTML elements. The element creates a scope for the transition, ∴ the transition pseudo-elements are affected by ancestor clips and transforms. Multiple SVTs on separate elements can run *concurrently*.

🎉 Happy 30-month anniversary to Container Queries – in every browser since Feb, 2023. It was supposed to be impossible, but here we are! Why 2.5 years? Nothing will change tomorrow, but Baseline uses this milestone to signal confidence a feature has gained "wide" support. youtu.be/bhHV0rQ3-CQ