~javascriptweekly | Issue 729 - The tale of a bizarre bug encountered in Google Docs (15)

🔎 Fuzzball: Fuzzy String Matching Library — To tackle those cases where what’s typed isn’t quite what’s wanted. There’s a neat tree-themed Web-based demo.

🤖 An MCP Server for Playwright and Browser Automation — MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers enable certain LLM-based agents (such as Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor) to perform actions on a system outside of their usual sandbox. This new project from Microsoft enables such LLMs to interact with browsers via Playwright.

Lexical 0.29: An Easy-to-Extend Text Editor Framework from Meta — A text editor framework built by Meta with extensibility, accessibility, and cross platform support in mind (there’s even a Swift variant for iOS). There’s a live playground if you want to give it a try.

⭐ The State of Vue.js Report 2025 — Created with the support of the Vue and Nuxt teams, this is no mere collection of statistics and charts (though there’s plenty of both) but a thorough update on the state of both projects and an interview with Evan You on Vue (and Vite's) latest developments. Essential reading for any Vue, Vite, or Nuxt user and a...

Master Chrome's DevTools — Join Jon Kuperman for this video course diving into Chrome's DevTools. You'll go beyond console.log(), learning how to inspect, debug, and audit your web apps — tracking performance, identifying bottlenecks, making performance gains, and more. Level up your DevTools skills.

War Story: The Hardest Bug I Ever Debugged — A former engineer on the Google Docs team tells the tale of a bizarre error that afflicted Google Docs out of the blue about ten years ago. It’s a gnarly one and was only solved due to his swift access to V8’s engineers. If you’ve ever spent hours digging into a bug, you’ll feel glad...

Next.js's Recent Middleware Security Woes — Last weekend, a new version of Next.js landed to resolve a security vulnerability that could allow middleware to be bypassed. Self-hosted Next.js deployments need to be upgraded immediately. The news led to many responses including deep dives into the vulnerability and criticism of how it was all handled.

Writing a Tiny Undo/Redo Stack in JavaScript — You might prefer to lean upon an established approach (using Immer patches perhaps), but if you want to implement something small yourself, this might help.

Land Ahoy: Leaving the Sea of Nodes — A deeply technical post from a core member of the V8 JavaScript engine team that explains the limitations of Turbofan, one of V8’s optimizing compilers. If you don’t care for the internals of how your JavaScript is compiled and run, just be assured the V8 team is working to make it run even faster.

Mission jQuery Zero: How FreeAgent Removed jQuery From Its App — Despite popular developer sentiment, jQuery’s prevalence on the Web continues to be significant but “sometimes legends need to retire”.

▶  React Query API Design: Lessons Learned — You might know Dominik for all his work on React Query, TanStack Router, and his epic React Query - The Bad Parts series. Here, he walks us through the design choices made while building React Query and shares lessons and mistakes valuable to anyone building their own libraries. (30 minutes.)

Deploying a Next.js App to Production on Any Server — A popular article from last year that’s been updated for 2025 and Next.js 15.

Babylon.js 8.0: Microsoft's JavaScript 3D Engine — 8.0 adds support for improved ‘image based lighting’ and ‘area lights’ for environmental lighting and shadows, extra control of the render pipeline, and a new lightweight viewer. And, as always, they have ▶️ a short video showing it all off.

Which AI Model Is Best for Fixing Unit Test Errors? Claude, o3-mini, GPT-4o? — Better context wins every time. Wallaby enters the chat to give AI what it needs - test coverage and runtime values - to debug smarter.

Protect Against Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — With WorkOS Radar you can detect, verify and block harmful behaviour, protecting your app with advanced device fingerprinting. Stop fake signups, stop free tier abuse, and stop bot attacks and brute force attempts today.