{"generated_at":"2026-11-12T18:49:24.198Z","source":{"name":"Hacker News public API","url":"https://github.com/HackerNews/API","attribution":"Stories and comments are public Hacker News submissions by their respective authors. HackerHub is an independent reader, not affiliated with Y Combinator.","content_is_untrusted":true},"story_id":50443812,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50443812","total_comments":145,"returned":20,"scope":"Up to the requested number of top-level comments in Hacker News ranked order. Deleted comments are omitted. Nested replies are not fetched; this is not the complete thread.","comments":[{"id":50446132,"author":"surround","created_at":"2026-11-10T20:49:54.000Z","text":"Here's a list of browser features the skills will tell your agent to use that are stable in Chrome but not supported by Firefox and Safari:\n\n CSS @function\n CSS calc-size()\n CSS interpolate-size\n CSS corner-shape\n CSS border-shape\n CSS flex-wrap: balance\n CSS text-fit\n CSS text-decoration-skip-spaces\n CSS scroll-axis-lock\n CSS scroll-target-group\n CSS :target-current\n CSS scroll-initial-target\n CSS container scroll-state queries\n scrollsnapchange event\n scrollsnapchanging event\n HTML focusgroup\n Element.startViewTransition()\n CSS view-transition-scope\n Interest Invokers (interestfor)\n LanguageModel (Prompt API)\n LanguageDetector\n Translator\n Summarizer API\n Window.fetchLater()\n Speculation Rules API\n Long Animation Frames API\n VisibilityStateEntry\n PerformanceSoftNavigation\n InteractionContentfulPaint\n Connection-Allowlist\n CSS url() integrity() modifier\n HTML meta name=\"text-scale\"\n HTML template for\n HTML processing instructions\n PasswordCredential\n Promise-returning scroll methods\n Web App Origin Migration\n Local Network Access permissions\n Request.targetAddressSpace\n beforeinstallprompt event\n\nTo be fair, the skills also recommend ~11 features not supported by Chrome itself. And the project does seem concerned with compatibility: \"Guiding models to use sensible, lightweight fallbacks.\"","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":5,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50446132"},{"id":50444594,"author":"simonw","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:57:17.000Z","text":"Distribution suggestion: in addition to the npm packages you have right now, set up GitHub Pages to publish a markdown index document of the skills at https://googlechrome.github.io/modern-web-guidance-src/skill... (currently a 404)\nThat index page should link to plain markdown versions of all of the documents, and should be designed for search with grep to find the right answers.\nThat way I don't have to install anything at all - provided my agent has the ability to make HTTP requests I can tell it \"Look for tips on https://googlechrome.github.io/modern-web-guidance-src/skill...\" and it will fetch the index, then navigate to the most relevant documents - no MCP or npm or installation required at all.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":4,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444594"},{"id":50444758,"author":"advisedwang","created_at":"2026-11-10T19:07:34.000Z","text":"Chrome already has too much power in the browser standards world. The last thing we need is everyone's LLMs to follow Chrome team's guidance on how to do web development. This road leads back to \"To view this site, please view in [DOMINANT BROWSER]\"","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":5,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444758"},{"id":50445920,"author":"chalmovsky","created_at":"2026-11-10T20:33:27.000Z","text":"Amazing! I'm just writing an article about how Alex Russell's quote about 'React being a legacy technology' got, unfortunately, totally ignored.\nAnd now this just fell in my lap! Some of the arguments I wanted to make seem to be provide here. Didn't have a chance to take a proper look at it, but it looks very promising and nice!\nThank you!","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":2,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50445920"},{"id":50449154,"author":"bakkoting","created_at":"2026-11-11T02:37:25.000Z","text":"> If you spot something wrong or weird, give us a holler!\nBut how? Hopefully filing an issue on the modern-web-guidance-src repo is the right place? Anyway I filed one for using fromBase64 and toBase64 instead of atob and btoa.\nBut since you're all in on agents anyway you should consider having one look through at least all of the JS, DOM, and HTML spec commits in the last 3-5 years and automatically triaging any that are clear improvements and are not used by agents. Would be pretty straightforward.\n---\nBtw, I think it would be very helpful to automatically provide versions of this depending on what browsers you're targeting. I don't want to use anything that hasn't been available in all evergreen browsers for at least a year, for example; I think most developers have a similar standard, or at the very least don't want to use the bleeding edge. And while it is _possible_ to get that from your repo, it takes some effort, either writing a script or letting the agent use its own judgement for every feature. That's work you could do on your end and save the rest of us from needing to.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50449154"},{"id":50445138,"author":"cadamsdotcom","created_at":"2026-11-10T19:33:21.000Z","text":"Planning to give this one a wide berth.\nThe more \"legacy code\" is getting written everyday the more the web will be forced to remain backwards compatible...","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50445138"},{"id":50446257,"author":"internet2000","created_at":"2026-11-10T20:59:51.000Z","text":"NO THANK YOU. Do not want my agents to contribute to the Chrome monoculture. Chrome is the new IE6.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50446257"},{"id":50444390,"author":"halflife","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:42:14.000Z","text":"Finally.\nThis is exactly what I need when I need it. The amount of pull requests I reviewed with a mess of codes that can be switched to 2 lines of modern features made me write such tools myself, only half assed since I have other things to do.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444390"},{"id":50444183,"author":"phyzix5761","created_at":"2026-11-10T18:26:29.000Z","text":"\"Best Practices\" are pretty much dead in the AI era. Pretty soon no one is going to read any of the code AI produces and that's a scary thought.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":6,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50444183"},{"id":50446852,"author":"codepoet80","created_at":"2026-11-10T21:55:45.000Z","text":"I want the opposite of this. I want compatible code -- which is really hard, when there are so many eras to target. So far AI has done a great job of finding that sweet spot -- why would I want a tool that encourages the agent to write less compatible code?","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50446852"},{"id":50447665,"author":"SoftTalker","created_at":"2026-11-10T23:15:32.000Z","text":"Remeber, the features you don't use are the ones you don't have to support, or scramble to replace when they are deprecated.\nKeep your effing websites simple.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":2,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50447665"},{"id":50451858,"author":"zahlman","created_at":"2026-11-11T10:41:33.000Z","text":"> Browsers natively handle a lot of what used to take 50 lines of JS (or a dependency): `CSS.highlights` for text range highlighting without <span>s everywhere\nI tried to look this up and found https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/S... but the example depends on JS. How are you meant to statically specify highlighted ranges without the <span> markup? If I'm syntax-highlighting code on a blog, it's seems a lot more practical to just use the old <span> system than to encode a list of character ranges in a JS array and loop to assign highlights. Plus it doesn't require the reader to run JS.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50451858"},{"id":50449548,"author":"flossly","created_at":"2026-11-11T03:47:03.000Z","text":"I prefer to have my templates in a compiled language: not passing a map of strings to a string with interpolation points, but actually \"just code\" by which I define HTML builders by combining templates/layouts/components in that same \"just code\".\nLike HtmlFlow (Java/Kotlin) or kotlinx.html.\nI pick Tailwind and Alpine.js to go with this approach because: I want to be SSR-first (with small JS-based improvements where they matter most) so NOT and SPA, i want the styling to be close to the HTML code that's being styled (no need to match between CSS definition and usage), and I also prefer to keep my tiny bits of JS close to the HTML it deals with (Alpine makes that easy and provides a clear path for implementing 99% of my JS needs).\nLike everyone, LLMs code it for me :) But the result is easy to reason about for myself and my LLM. Little vanilla JS. No jQuery. Mostly just some HTML-bound Alpine instructions. And Tailwind everywhere. This way I can look at one place to see how it works: or CTRL-click my way to it.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50449548"},{"id":50445022,"author":"fumar","created_at":"2026-11-10T19:25:33.000Z","text":"I added this a few months ago and Claude Doctor has not removed it. It must be working and getting use.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50445022"},{"id":50451620,"author":"merelydev","created_at":"2026-11-11T10:07:16.000Z","text":"> Coding agents often default to older patterns because LLM training data contains vast amounts of legacy code. This often leads them to generate bloated JavaScript for tasks that now have native, high-performance web platform solutions.\nYes, now I can confirm I am not a crackpot when I said this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854536\nThe main problem I see is that it will be extremely hard for new frameworks, languages to take off if everyone is using AI to code. It can lead to a future where all new programming languages and frameworks will be developed by LLM providers because only they, can train them with synthetic data.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50451620"},{"id":50446794,"author":"pyrolistical","created_at":"2026-11-10T21:50:12.000Z","text":"I asked my agent to look at that list and only apply things that work on chrome, Firefox, safari iOS and safari macos\nCame up with a good list for my project","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50446794"},{"id":50453534,"author":"iantpe","created_at":"2026-11-11T14:00:42.000Z","text":"After my research, I found that if you want to use this skill, it's best to specify the range of browsers you want to support in the AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md of the repository (e.g., \"Only use the Baseline Widely Available feature\"), and keep the experimental features disabled by default. This way you can avoid some worrying issues.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453534"},{"id":50445033,"author":"reedlaw","created_at":"2026-11-10T19:26:46.000Z","text":"These skills look better than most, but running my code through the legacy scan only found two issues. So while I still think training beats skills, I'm sure this has its place, especially with weaker models.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50445033"},{"id":50446217,"author":"dallen33","created_at":"2026-11-10T20:56:09.000Z","text":"Paul Irish?? There's a name I haven't though about in ages! I remember following you on Twitter and your website was full of amazing information. Hope you're doing well!","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50446217"},{"id":50450822,"author":"dflock","created_at":"2026-11-11T07:58:27.000Z","text":"I've been using this skill with Claude on a new project and it's nice, but it's quite expensive, token wise. It's ~$5 per use, on my codebase, which seems fairly high to me. This is according to the crappy stats in the claude usage thing, so not sure how accurate that is.","parent_id":50443812,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50450822"}]}