Many voices raised up this week against Google's decision to start testing FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) for some of the users. Are you affected by the change? You can now check it out.
It was also a release week, with all major browsers rolling out updates: version 90 for Chrome and Edge, and version 88 for Firefox. Speaking of releases, Deno 1.9 is out, as well as Cypress 7.1.0, D3 v6.7.0, and many other interesting packages.
Are You FLoCed?
Recently Google has promoted FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) as their solution to replace third-party cookies. However, many voices call this initiative a worse cure than the problem it tries to solve.
DuckDuckGo, Brave, and Vivaldi have decried publicly this initiative. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has even created a website that can tell users if their Chrome browser is testing FLoc.
The Verge has taken this topic to the other browser makers: Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and Apple (sort of). None of them are supporting this initiative publicly. Will this sink the initiative? It's too early to say.
The topic is very loaded, with lots of arguments to be considered. And if all this is interesting to you, I invite you to check the (many) articles linked below. And don't forget to check if you've been FLoCed yet.
- Brave: Why Brave Disables FLoC
- Vivaldi: No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FLoC’ed.
- DuckDuckGo: Use the DuckDuckGo Extension to Block FLoC, Google’s New Tracking Method in Chrome
- Electronic Frontier Foundation: Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
- The Verge: Nobody is flying to join Google’s FLoC
Browser news
Chrome
Chrome 90 has rolled out to users over the last week. The highlights of the update are the support for the new overflow: clip property and a new option to implement and use Shadow DOM directly in HTML.
Edge
As Edge is now powered by Chromium, their update cycle is synchronized to the one of Chrome. Version 90 brings over better font rendering, improved printing features, new policies, and more. You should check out the release notes for a full list of the changes.
Firefox
Firefox barely made the line for this issue, as it updated right as I was editing this newsletter. Version 88 brings support for :user-valid and :user-invalid, outline now follows border-radius shape, and FTP support has been disabled.
WebKit
WebKit didn't release an update this week, but they did introduce a nice feature in the CSS Grid Inspector. This will make life easier for all developers testing their work in this browser.
Software updates and Releases
- Cypress 7.1.0 - Testing for anything that runs in a browser
- D3 v6.7.0 - Data visualization toolkit
- Deno 1.9 - simple, modern and secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript
- electron-boilerplate v9.0.0 - Boilerplate application for Electron runtime
- eslint-plugin-vue v7.9.0 - ESLint plugin for Vue.js
- react-markdown 6.0.0 - Markdown component for React
- Redwood v0.30.0 - Bringing full-stack to the Jamstack
- Reseter CSS v1.1.0 - A futuristic alternative to Normalize And CSS resets
Wrapping things up
That's all I have prepared for this issue. Have a great and productive week, keep yourselves safe, and I will see you next time!