February 6, 2026
Hot CSS, hotter phones
Solving Shrinkwrap: New Experimental Technique
Shrinkwrap breakthrough or battery burner? Devs are split
TLDR: A developer demoed a clever way to make text boxes tightly fit their content using new browser features. The crowd is torn between excitement over a long‑sought fix and worries about Safari hiccups and reports of iPhones heating up, sparking a debate: breakthrough or battery‑boiling party trick?
The web’s styling nerds are buzzing after a developer claimed an experimental fix for the long‑annoying “shrinkwrap” problem—making a box snugly fit auto‑wrapped text—using anchor positioning and scroll-driven animations. Translation: a clever trick to make boxes hug their words instead of stretching awkwardly. Some commenters are calling it “wizard-level CSS,” thrilled to finally see a path that works in Chrome and Safari (with graceful fallback elsewhere). Others? They’re side‑eyeing the fine print: the author warns of Safari instability and an ugly bug he had to work around.
Then came the heat. Literally. One user, rimunroe, reported that on an iPhone 16 Pro, the demo spiked power use and heated the phone. Cue instant drama. Fans say this is the price of progress and a preview of a future native feature. Skeptics say it’s a flashy demo that could toast your battery and shouldn’t touch production. Jokes flew: “CSS so hot it melts your phone,” “text-wrap: balance? more like power-usage: imbalance,” and a “Shrinkwrap rap battle: Chrome vs Safari.” Meanwhile, standards nerds waved the old “shrink-to-fit” spec and asked the CSS Working Group to make this official—without turning phones into pocket warmers.
Key Points
- •The article proposes an experimental CSS technique combining anchor positioning and scroll-driven animations to achieve true shrinkwrapping of auto-wrapped content.
- •The method adjusts an element’s outer dimensions based on measurements of its inner content, affecting actual layout rather than only visuals.
- •It is reported to work in many cases in stable Chrome and Safari, with graceful degradation in other browsers.
- •The technique is highly experimental; the author observed occasional Safari crashes and advises caution for production use.
- •Context includes CSS2’s shrink-to-fit rules and prior discussions by Elika J. Etemad and a CSSWG GitHub issue on shrinking to fit.