Collection of interesting bits and bytes about the Web. Mostly short and to the point.
Temporal has shipped in Firefox 139.
Thank you, André!
Interop 2025 is a cross-browser effort to improve the interoperability of the web — to reach a state where each technology works exactly the same in every browser.
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Temporal is an ECMAScript proposal to add new date and time APIs to JavaScript.
It has been in the making for a long time by now. The proposal's repository appeared in 2017 and a lot of activity happened within the last four years. One topic that took a while was the IETF standardization of string formats used in zone annotations. But that has been completed at the end of 2023.
In mid 2024, a scope reduction was discussed at the meetings of TC39. Apparently, some implementors have reservations about the proposal's size and complexity. As a result, some parts of the proposal were removed and may be added in future proposals instead.
But now, finally, it looks like we may soon see Temporal within browsers and other JavaScript engines. Until recently, implementors were not allowed to ship Temporal implementations without hiding them behind a flag. But that restriction was removed from Temporal's README in January. And in the July meeting of TC39, it was noted that Temporal implementations may ship unflagged. Even better, the work-in-progress implementations of Temporal in SpiderMonkey (Firefox), V8 (Chrome), and JavaScriptCore (Safari) already pass many of the required feature tests.
One remaining open issue is the final normative specification text for ECMAScript Temporal, though. But we may already see first implementations and polyfills hopefully soon. Thanks to everybody involved in the process!
The meeting of Ecma TC39 in June 2024 discussed the Temporal proposal that has been in the works for a long time by now. Unfortunately, the discussion was not about being able to publish it soon. Instead, a scope reduction was proposed. Apparently, implementors (Google, Apple, Mozilla) have reservations about the proposal's scope size and complexity.
Further information and the exact discussions that took place presumably were not publicly available so far. But now, there is an open PR to add these to the usual repository that contains TC39 meeting notes.
Conclusion: The committee reached consensus that the Temporal proposal is apparently too big. Some parts of it need to be stripped for now and may be reconsidered in follow-up proposals. Specifically, the following parts will be removed from the current proposal:
Temporal.CalendarTemporal.TimeZonegetISOFields() methodswithPlainDate() methodsPlainTime’s toPlainDateTime and toZonedDateTime methodsepochSeconds propertiesepochMicroseconds propertiesInstant.fromEpochSecondsInstant.fromEpochMicrosecondsPlainDateTime and ZonedDateTime’s toPlainYearMonth and toPlainMonthDay methodsInstant’s toZonedDateTime methodNow.zonedDateTimeNow.plainDateTimeNow.plainDaterelativeTo option from Duration.add.Let's hope that at least the subset of Temporal can be published as a standard soon. Ideally with ECMAScript 2025.
ECMAScript 2024 has been released.
The following proposals have reached stage 4 and are part of ECMAScript 2024:
Atomics.waitAsync
Promise.withResolvers
Most of these new features have already landed in all the important browser engines.