Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Bocoup and Igalia have collaborated to solve browser compatibility issues, provide more consistent support for web technologies and unify the operation of elements that affect the appearance and behavior of sites and web applications. The main goal of the initiative is to achieve the same appearance and behavior of sites, regardless of the browser and operating system - the web platform should be holistic and developers should pay attention to creating web applications, and not looking for ways to bypass certain incompatibilities between browsers.
As part of the initiative, a new toolkit for testing browsers 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: CSS cascading layers, color spaces (color-mix, color-contrast), CSS contain property (CSS Containment), elements for creating dialog boxes ( ), web forms, scrolling (scroll snap, scroll-behavior, overscroll-behavior), typography tools (font-variant-alternates, font-variant-position), working with encodings (ic), API Web Compat, Flexbox, CSS Grid (subgrid), CSS transformations and sticky positioning (CSS position: sticky).
The tests were compiled based on feedback from web developers and user complaints about differences in browser behavior. The problems are divided into two categories - errors or shortcomings in the implementation of support for web standards (15 tests) and problems associated with ambiguities or incomplete instructions in the specifications (3 tests). The second category of issues being addressed includes specification deficiencies related to content editing (contentEditable), execCommand, mouse and pointer events, and viewport units (lv*, sv*, and dv* for largest, smallest, and dynamic Viewport sizes).
The project also launched a platform to test experimental and stable releases of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari browsers. The best progress in eliminating incompatibilities was shown by Firefox, which scored 69% for the stable branch and 74% for the experimental branch. For comparison, Chrome scored 61% and 71%, and Safari scored 50% and 73%.
Source: opennet.ru