Firefox 71: First Out of the Gate With Subgrid
A great release from Firefox this week! See the whole roundup post from Chris Mills. I’m personally stoked to see clip-path: path(); go live, which we’ve been tracking as it’s so clearly useful. We also get column-span: all; which is nice in case you’re one of the few taking advantages of CSS columns.
But there are two other things I think are a very big deal:
- If you have fluid images (most sites do) via flexible-width containers and
img { max-width: 100%; }, you’re subject to somewhat janky loading as those images load in because the browser doesn’t know how tall the space to reserve needs to be until it knows the dimensions of the image. But now, if you put width/height attributes (e.g.), Firefox (and Chrome) will calculate the aspect ratio from those and reserve the correct amount of space. It seems like a small thing, but it really isn’t. It will improve the perceived loading for a zillion sites. - Now we’ve got subgrid! Remember Eric Meyer called them essential years ago. They allow you to have an element share the grid lines of parent elements instead of needing to establish new ones. The result might be less markup flattening and cleaner designs. A grid of “cards” is a great example here, which Miriam covers in this video showing how you can get much more logical space distribution. It must be in the water, as Anton Ball covers the same concept in this post. I’m a fan of how this is progressive-enhancement friendly. You can still set grid columns/rows on an element for browsers that don’t support subgrid, but then
display: subgrid;to have them inherit lines instead in supporting browsers.
