CSS Anchor Positioning + Popover API: JS-Free Dropdowns

For a decade, building a tooltip, dropdown menu, or popover meant reaching for Floating UI, Popper.js, or hand-rolled getBoundingClientRect() math wired to scroll listeners. Every team rebuilt the same mess: a click handler, a positioning loop, an outside-click handler, an Escape-key handler, focus management. None of that was the actual feature. It was the price of admission.

As of May 2026, that price has dropped to roughly zero. The Popover API shipped in all evergreen browsers, and CSS Anchor Positioning followed: Chrome and Edge since 125, Firefox since 132, Safari since 18.2 (with full @position-try in 18.4). Together they replace 90% of what you used JavaScript for, declaratively, in CSS.