CSS Grid Lanes Just Made Masonry.js Optional

WebKit's CSS Grid Lanes, native masonry layout, is now shipping in Safari 26. Set a masonry value on grid auto flow, define your columns, and a masonry gallery lays itself out in plain CSS. No JavaScript measuring column heights, no library, no build step for it.

For years, a masonry grid meant reaching for Isotope or Masonry.js, waiting for images to load, letting a script measure every card, and then watching the whole gallery shuffle into place a beat after the rest of the page rendered. That shuffle was never a nice touch, it was a workaround for something the layout language could not do natively.

Now it can. A masonry gallery is a grid property, not a dependency, not a client side calculation running after your images finish loading, not a chunk of bundle size you are shipping just to arrange some cards.

We do not say this often about a CSS feature, but a real dependency just became unnecessary. Browser support will take time to catch up everywhere, Safari first, others following, so a fallback is still sensible for now. But the direction is clear. The layout problem that justified an entire category of small JS libraries is being absorbed into the platform, and that is exactly the kind of change that quietly simplifies a project's dependency list a year from now.