inert VS focus-visible

Regarding support, I can recommend installing the inert polyfill while waiting for all browsers to support it: https://github.com/WICG/inert

Around two years ago I wrote a post, that I'm still very proud of, called "Using portals to make a modal popup". It made use of portals and inert. At the time there wasn't really a good way to display a modal popup on top of everything else and trap focus within it.

We'll be using wicg-inert for our project. So let's run npm install wicg-inert in our terminal to get it into our project.

inert/inert.js at master · WICG/inert

It’s clear that Apple’s Webkit/Safari team are not going to fix this issue. There is an excellent polyfill available for :focus-visible from the WICG. There is a good polyfill available for :focus-within as well. But there is no polyfill for :focus, so Nick Gard has written one. You can read more in this post.

GitHub - WICG/focus-visible: Polyfill for :focus-visible

In the meantime, we can load the WICG focus-visible polyfill to offer improved focus styles in browsers that yet don't support it. Ideally we don't force browsers that support focus-visible to download a polyfill when it's unnecessary - and in future when all modern browsers support the feature, we don't want to ship that redundant code.

Now we have the :focus-visible pseudo-class. But there is again an issue. This selector is supported by chrome, firefox, and edge but not by safari. But thanks to the polyfill. With this polyfill, it will be supported by all major browsers. But we need to slightly update the code.

I'm going to use Nuxt.js and Tailwind because those are my favorite tools, but you can apply what you will learn here to every project. The real hero behind the scenes here is the focus-visible Polyfill.