FE Bits Vol.35 | Deno 2.8 Released, A Roundup of CSS Features for 2026 | Weekly

This article has been machine-translated from Chinese. The translation may contain inaccuracies or awkward phrasing. If in doubt, please refer to the original Chinese version.

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Today is June 1, 2026, Monday — Happy Children's Day!

Personal Updates

Moving

These past two weeks I've been busy moving to Huizhou — nonstop. Packing and moving is really exhausting…… though I wasn't the main force hauling and assembling things, mostly playing a decorating-and-tidying role (

Bought a whole pile of stuff, totally burned out. These days have been all about unboxing deliveries, picking up packages, and tidying the place — busy as anything, and I've only gotten halfway.

But living in Daya Bay, Huizhou really has a much better quality of life than Guangzhou. I love it. I often see people out singing, and a short walk gets me to Wanda and Yonghui Supermarket. The greenery feels great too — not a hint of ghost-town vibes. And there aren't nearly as many electric scooters darting around everywhere like in Guangzhou, and motorcycles aren't banned, which is just wonderful.

Stuffed myself with an 89-yuan BBQ set for two…… so delicious, the value is off the charts, and the meat-to-veggie balance was great too. The place is called Sanfei Qishou (三肥七瘦).

I've been run off my feet lately, and my motivation to update the newsletter is running a bit low — but I'm putting one out anyway.

VSCode got laggy after the update

It started when I posted a tweet saying: "A little sad — VSCode has gotten super laggy now, painfully slow to open. I've lost the urge to use it regularly or to recommend extensions. My old VSCode-extension recommendation article series feels like it's becoming a thing of the past too. These days I'm embracing lazygit and Zed."

Then I happened to see lots of others griping about the VSCode update, so I'll record my own impressions here.

I used to be a heavy VSCode user. Memory usage was always high, but it never used to make you wait a century to cold-start the way the new version does after that pile of AI feature updates.

Disclaimer: on my M1 Max 64GB, I used to frequently launch Cursor / Zed and VSCode at the same time and switch between them, always starting a new worktree project with "disable all" extensions — and VSCode has clearly gotten way slower than before……

When a tool isn't pleasant to use, of course you try a few others lol. And if it gets better, switching back later is always an option.

That said, I still haven't uninstalled it, because I genuinely love VSCode's extension ecosystem. My machine still has Zed, Cursor, and VSCode all installed — gotta eat what's on the table, x

Zed is fast, but its layout and such do take some getting used to. We'll see how the experience goes down the road.

My urge to express has dropped sharply lately

My enthusiasm has dipped a bit too — what's going on with that (?)

Articles

Deno 2.8 officially released, major Node.js compatibility improvements: Node.js compatibility soars to 76.4%, with support for deno install replacing npm install.
The birth of a top-tier scrollbar: How to build a super cool custom scrollbar effect with CSS.
Cross-Document View Transitions Part 2 deep dive: An in-depth look at smooth animation handling and state restoration with the View Transitions API during MPA navigation.
A comprehensive roundup of CSS centering methods in 2026: A systematic comparison of centering techniques across modern approaches like Flexbox and Grid — great reference for beginners.

Building framework-agnostic design systems (Part 1): Using Web Components and Eleventy to build a portable design system component library and docs.
Chrome's declarative partial updates API explained: Introduces two sets of new APIs enabling out-of-order streaming delivery of HTML, improving performance and developer experience.
Creating scroll-driven SVG map animations with GSAP: A tutorial detailing how to combine GSAP's ScrollTrigger to achieve dynamic SVG map paths and interactions.
A deep analysis of CSS vs JavaScript animation performance: Breaks down conventional misconceptions, explaining the fundamental impact of main-thread blocking on animation smoothness.
The value of and advice for technical writing in the AI age: Explores AI's impact on technical writing, advising a focus on real-world cases and avoiding AI-generated body text.
Revealing text with CSS letter-spacing: Hides text with negative spacing then transitions it open, achieving a letter-by-letter reveal effect.

CSS News

April 2026 Baseline monthly digest: CSS contrast-color() and more: The CSS automatic-contrast color function, high-precision sums, and several other web features enter Baseline.
In-N-Out Animations: Dialogs (Part 1/3): How to use modern CSS features (allow-discrete and @starting-style) to elegantly solve the enter/exit animation challenge for elements like <dialog> when switching discrete display properties.

Tools

react-doctor: automatic React code diagnosis and repair tool: An open-source tool that auto-fixes bad React code, usable as a Skill for AI agents.
Liquid Layout, a lightweight web layout engine, released: A small, extensible layout engine inspired by SwiftUI, designed for scenarios like Canvas where CSS falls short. Demo | GitHub | npm i @liquid-dom/layout

Fun Sites

Aimee's Papercraft World interactive site: A visually interactive site showcasing exquisite papercraft creations, with unique interaction design.
JS Crossword: a hardcore JavaScript crossword game: A fun crossword game where each clue equals the result of eval()-ing the answer, testing your grasp of JS implicit conversions.