For many years the war between the main web browsers has been quite evident, either imposing itself through different types of strategies, either playing fairly or simply implementing various types of blocks or obstacles to the user to prevent them from changing their web browser.
However Now things seem to be "changing", since Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Bocoup and Igalia recently announced that they have collaborated to solve various problems of browser compatibility, as well as being able to provide more consistent support for web technologies and unify the operation of elements that affect the appearance of websites and web applications (something that has been missing for a long time and many developers have requested).
From the latter, we could say that at least since the introduction of smartphones, web development has been unified a little more, but not to the point that a single specification can be used in all the design and especially in the execution of scripts.
For the first time ever, all major browser vendors and other stakeholders have come together to resolve major browser compatibility issues identified by web developers. Interop 2022 will improve the development experience for the web in 15 key areas. In this article, find out how we got here, what the project is focused on, how success will be measured, and how you can track progress.
That is why now the giants and referents of web browsers have joined forces with the main objective of being able to achieve the same appearance and behavior of the sites, regardless of the browser and the operating system.
Within what is intended to be achieved is that the web platform must be holistic and developers must pay attention to the creation of web applications and not find ways to avoid certain incompatibilities between browsers.
In 2019, Mozilla, Google and others started A big effort to understand the pain points of the developers, in the form of MDN Developer Needs Assessment surveys and the Browser Compatibility Report deep immersion. These reports gave us detailed and actionable insights to address the top challenges for developers with the web platform and led to the compat effort 2021 .
As part of the initiative, a new browser testing toolkit has been prepared, Interop 2022, which includes 18 jointly prepared tests that assess the level of implementation of recently developed web technologies.
Among the technologies evaluated by the tests are:
- Cascading CSS Layers
- color spaces (color-mix, color-contrast)
- CSS Property Containers (CSS Containment)
- elements to create dialogs ( )
- web forms
- scroll (scroll snap, scroll-behavior, overscroll-behavior)
- font (font-variant-alternates, font-variant-position)
- encodings (ic)
- Web Support API
- flexbox
- CSS Grid (subgrid)
- css transforms
- fixed positioning (CSS).
It is mentioned that the tests are based on feedback from web developers and user complaints about discrepancy in browser behavior.
The problems that were worked on are divided into two categories: errors or deficiencies in the implementation of web standards support (15 tests) and problems related to ambiguities or incomplete instructions in the specifications (3 tests).
Among the issues under consideration in the second category, there are flaws in specifications related to content editing (contentEditable), execCommand, mouse and pointer events, visible area units (lv*, sv* and dv* for the smallest units). large, smaller and dynamic). viewport sizes).
It should be mentioned that the project also released a platform for testing experimental builds and stable from Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari browsers. Firefox showed the best progress in resolving incompatibilities, with 69% for the stable branch and 74% for the experimental branch. By comparison, Chrome scored 61% and 71%, while Safari scored 50% and 73%.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link