I’ve managed to watch most of the sessions released today and yesterday. Here are some of my personal highlights:
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WebExtensions API support in Safari is excellent news for people building browser extensions. For those not familiar, it’s a standard way of developing cross-browser extensions, currently supported by both Mozilla and Google.
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On the subject of Safari, several features and improvements made their way in this release. I’m particularly excited about the CSS bits, such as support for the
:is()pseudo-selector, system font families, and CSS Shadow Parts—a way to allow Web Components to expose internal elements to the outside for styling purposes. Oh and WebP support. -
As part of the Web Authentication API implementation in Safari, you can now use Face ID and Touch ID for user sign-in on your Web apps. You heard that right.
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The new SwiftUI app life cycle is nothing short of impressive. I have been upgrading all my unreleased apps to this new API—since it’s iOS 14 only—and it’s been eye-opening to see how far this declarative approach goes in getting rid of boilerplate.
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Contextual menus are now generalized in iOS and can be invoked from any button without requiring a long press or adding an overlay on top of the view. This is my favorite new addition to iOS this year—by far. Action sheets were always clunky to work with, and popovers felt off on the iPhone. It’s worth noting that SwiftUI doesn’t seem to have access to this new API as of this beta (Feedback:
FB7776866).