The contributions in the webpack organizations increased a lot in the last time. This comes with new challenges. — We are currently paying every contributor an estimated $50/hour for contributing to any webpack project (when contributed at least 6 hours per month). This means with increasing contributions the cost will increase. Sadly the sponsorships don’t increase in the same way. You may notice the problem from the graph, we…

webpack 4.6.0 adds support for prefetching (and preloading). — TL;DR: Use import(/* webpackPrefetch: true */ "...") for prefetching. What‘s <link rel=”prefetch”>? This “Resource Hint” tells the browser that this is a resource that is probably needed for some navigation in the future. Browsers usually fetch this resource when they are in idle state. After fetched the resource sits ready in the HTTP…

webpack 4 made some major improvements to the chunk graph and added a new optimization for chunk splitting (which is a kind of improvement over the CommonsChunkPlugin). Let’s take a look at some of the drawbacks of the old chunk graph. In the old graph chunks were connected to other…

One of the breaking changes in webpack 4 is the behavior of import() when importing non-ESM (i. e. CommonJS modules). — Actually there are a lot of cases to consider when using import(). But let’s start with few naming hints: Source: the module containing the import() expression Target: the module referenced by the request in the import() expression non-ESM: a CommonJs or AMD module not setting __esModule: true transpiled-ESM: a CommonJS module…

webpack adds a mode option. What does that mean? — So webpack 4 added a mode option. And it’s required. (Actually it’s not required but it will warn you if you omit it.) webpack 4 now ships with two sets of defaults. development and production. These are the two values to which mode can be set to. The development defaults…

This guide targets plugin and loader authors — For loaders: this.options and this.rootContext webpack 3 already deprecated this.options in the loader context. webpack 4 removes it now. A lot of people are missing the this.options.context value now. It has been added as this.rootContext. Guideline: Loaders should receive all options via this.query. They should not use other ways to receive options, i. e. …

2017/09/25–2017/10/22 — What happend in webpack 3? We released a few new webpack 3 versions 3.7.0, 3.7.1, 3.8.0, 3.8.1. Like always we merged a lot of bugfixes. Best read the change logs for details on these bugfixes. Stats validation The validation of the stats option was broken in version < 3.8.1. …

The Fellowship is a three month long program supporting three to five open-source developers with $8k per month to focus full-time on their project, no other strings attached. Details: https://segment.com/blog/segment-open-fellowship-2017/ Why did I apply? About 6 months ago the webpack collective had only a few Sponsors, but we were using very little of the…

2017/09/11–2017/09/24 — In the last weeks I finished and merged all queued PRs with breaking changes and features for webpack 4. Here is a summary of the important ones, so you are not surprised when you read it in the changelog: Sets Many classes now use Sets (or SortableSets) on the API level…