Two releases quietly shipped for Tailwind CSS recently, and together they add a solid set of new utilities worth knowing about.
What came in v4.2
Four new color palettes
Tailwind now ships with mauve, olive, mist, and taupe out of the box. These fill a gap that’s been annoying for a while — neutral-adjacent colors that aren’t quite gray but aren’t quite anything else either.
Webpack plugin with real build speed improvements
There’s now a dedicated webpack plugin that reportedly delivers 2x+ build speed improvements over the previous approach. If you’re on a webpack-based setup, this is probably the most immediately useful thing in v4.2.
Logical property utilities
More logical property utilities landed for block and inline spacing and sizing. These matter if you’re building for right-to-left languages or just want layout that adapts to writing direction without extra CSS.
Font feature control
A new font-features-* utility gives you access to OpenType font features — things like ligatures, small caps, and tabular numbers — directly from your HTML.
What came in v4.3
First-party scrollbar styling
This one’s been a long time coming. Tailwind now has built-in utilities for scrollbar-width, scrollbar-color, and scrollbar-gutter. Previously you either reached for a plugin or wrote custom CSS. The new utilities map directly to the CSS scrollbar properties, so you get consistent cross-browser scrollbar control without the workarounds.
@container-size for container queries
A new @container-size utility lets you read container dimensions inside container queries, specifically targeting block-size. This makes it easier to write styles that respond to a container’s height rather than just its width.
zoom-* and tab-* utilities
Two smaller additions: zoom-* maps to the CSS zoom property, and tab-* controls tab-size for controlling how tab characters render in preformatted text.
Stacked and compound variants in @variant
The @variant directive now accepts stacked and compound variants. This means you can express more complex variant combinations directly in CSS rather than only in your HTML class strings.
Default values in functional utilities
Functional utility definitions now support --default(…) syntax, which lets you specify fallback values inside custom utility definitions. Useful if you’re building design system utilities on top of Tailwind.
Upgrade tooling
The v4.3 release also includes fixes to the upgrade tool’s canonicalizer, which should make migrating existing projects a bit less painful.