A photo of my face against a blue background.I'm Patrick, a product manager on the Edge team at Microsoft. I do developer relations, and work on a wide range of web platform technologies and tools. Previously, I worked at Mozilla, on the Firefox DevTools team.
I'm part of the Open Web Docs governing committee and a co-chair of the W3C WebDX community group. I also run DevTools Tips.

I have 20+ years of working experience with the web and have worked as a designer, web developer, software engineer, browser engineer, engineering manager, and product manager.

To get in touch, use the links to my social networks at the bottom of this page, or email me: patrickbrosset at gmail dot com.

Unlock text editing use cases with highlightsFromPoint and other FromPoint APIs

Announcing the CSS.highlights.highlightsFromPoint() API, which lets you retrieve which custom highlights live at a given point in the viewport, and which unlocks powerful text editing use cases, such as tooltips, context menus, and more.

A paragraph of text with multiple different highlights, including some which overlap. The user has clicked on an area of the text where highlights exist. A popup is displayed where the user clicked, listing the highlights that were found at this point.

Test the clipboardchange event—a more efficient way to monitor the clipboard

The Edge web platform team is adding a new event to the Clipboard API: `clipboardchange`. This new event makes it much easier to react to changes in the system clipboard without having to read the content in a loop. This is more efficient and better for privacy. Interested? Test the event in Chromium-based browsers today, including via an origin trial, and let us know what you think.

Drawing of a clipboard.

Demanding more from our AI coding tools

AI can often be very shitty, and it comes with very real risks for the world. But it seems like it's here to stay, and it also seems like developers really like using it as a tool for coding. So, if we're going to continue using AI as a coding tool, we should do this in a responsible manner, and demand more from it.

An abstract illustration showing a blob, labeled AI, and its many tentacles spreading around it.

Styles in HTML

Who says we need CSS at all? The default user-agent styles of HTML elements comes with variations in sizes and colors already. More than enough to get some cool stuff done! (Kidding obviously, this was done while waiting for my flight at the airport, just trying to kill time really.)

An abstract graphical artwork, rendered by the demo.

Paint performance API test page

A test page for the PerformancePaintTiming API.

PerformancePaintTiming

Masonry - The pretty grid you didn’t see coming (Smashing Conference, NYC)

A lightning talk to introduce the upcoming CSS Masonry layout implementation in Chromium browser, what it's really about, why it makes sense to use a built-in implementation, how to use it, but also how to keep track of new browser features like it.

Title slide, saying 'Masonry, the pretty grid you didn't see coming', and the SmasingConf logo below it.

Filling the Gap - Decorating Layouts with CSS (Smashing Conference, Freiburg)

In this lightning talk, I introduced the new CSS Gap Decorations proposal, a super simple yet powerful and customizable, way to draw separators between elements of a layout. CSS Gap Decorations give you the tools you need to convey your design vision, in a way that's easy to maintain, and adaptable.

The SmashingConf Freiburg 2025 conference logo.