Published: May 30, 2025
With several announcements at Google I/O, May was the busiest month for Baseline yet in 2025—but there's more than just what happened at I/O. We have tooling updates, new articles, and feature updates to cover as well.
Baseline at Google I/O
The Chrome Developer Relations team brought Baseline to Google I/O in a big way—Baseline was featured in the developer keynote and web stage, we answered questions at the Q&A tables, and presented a live coding demonstration. Here's the greatest hits from I/O.
What's new in web
Our own Rachel Andrew gave a talk on the web stage at I/O on what's going on with the web. It was an informative session containing a quick overview of Baseline, features that are emerging as Baseline Newly available, and a reminder of just how much faster the web platform is evolving than ever before. If you're new to Baseline, it's a great overview and narrative to get you up to speed.
Visual Studio Code now supports Baseline
Big news: if you're a Visual Studio Code user, it is now shipping with support for Baseline in its standard build for CSS and HTML features. This is perhaps the biggest development in Baseline tooling yet this year, as this update won't require you to install a special extension to get this capability—it is built right in. Read the blog post for more information.
Baseline in your web development workflow
Finally, Jeremy Wagner gave a talk on the web stage at I/O about how to integrate Baseline into your web development workflow. The talk began with a brief overview of how Baseline works, what Baseline targets are, and how you can use the browserslist-config-baseline package in your projects to apply a specific Baseline target to your toolchain—in the case of the session, this was demonstrated in Vite, Babel, and PostCSS.
While the talk wasn't recorded, the browserslist-config-baseline package is a great starting point for you if you have an existing toolchain that uses Browserslist. We'll also soon be launching a codelab version of this talk so you can follow along on your own time.
Baseline Newly and Widely available features
This month, the CSS font-palette feature became Widely available, meaning you should expect it to be broadly compatible across users for your website.
While this happened in April, it's also worth noting that JSON import attributes also became Baseline Newly available. This means you can now import JSON files as modules in your web applications in all browsers!
How to choose your Baseline target
This month, Jeremy Wagner and Rachel Andrew launched a guide on how to select a Baseline target for your project. A Baseline target specifies what level of feature support you're aiming for in a project. There are fixed targets that are grouped by year, going from the current year to 2016. There are also the Newly and Widely available moving targets you can also choose. For more information, read the How to choose your Baseline target article.
Use Baseline with Browserslist
If you've chosen a Baseline target, you might be wondering how you can actually enforce it in a project. Luckily for you, our own Tony Conway has put together an npm package—browserslist-config-baseline—that shows you how you can set up your toolchain to scope a Browserslist config to your chosen target. It's one of the most consequential pieces of Baseline tooling to emerge so far. If your project uses Browserslist, you can benefit from this package. For more information, read Use Baseline with Browserslist.
The Baseline Netlify extension has shipped
One of the important factors to consider when choosing a Baseline target is to know the support for that target across your website's user base. This can be done in many ways, such as using RUMvision's tool or the free Google Analytics Baseline Checker tool.
Good news: If you're a Netlify user, there's a way for you to get this information courtesy of the Baseline Netlify extension. It's a quick install, and after a period of time, it can give you the information you need to select a Baseline target. For more information, read The Baseline Netlify extension has shipped.
Web Platform Dashboard updates
The Web Platform Dashboard is a website that gives quick access to information about the compatibility of features you might be interested in using, including if those features are Baseline. Recently, there were some updates to this dashboard that expose new and novel information to help you get a clearer understanding of the compatibility of web platform features. Check out the blog post on these updates to get more information.
Bluesky Baseline bot
Do you use Bluesky? Do you care about web platform feature compatibility? Then why not follow the Bluesky Baseline bot and get updates on when features reach Baseline. It's a nice way to get timely information about Baseline features right in your Bluesky feed!
Expanded Baseline support in the WebStorm IDE pre-release
WebStorm has recently expanded their support for Baseline to include hovercards for JavaScript features in their pre-release build! While this development is ongoing and has yet to land in the stable release, it's a nice addition to the IDE. WebStorm users can expect that this capability will land in the stable build at some point in the near future.
That's a wrap
As well as all the I/O announcements, we've seen a lot of great developments in all things Baseline, especially from a tooling perspective. The month of May has been a great success, and that momentum will carry forward through the rest of the summer!
As usual, let us know if we missed anything Baseline-related, and we'll make sure it gets captured in a future edition. See you in a month!