Interop 2022 project aims to fix inconsistent features across web browsers

by · XDA Developers

Most web browsers now share a common rendering engine, Google’s Chromium, but Safari and Firefox also have their own engines that are shared by other projects (such as Tor Browser). Those different architectures mean some web features don’t quite work the same across all browsers, which can become a headache for web developers and people browsing the web, but a new effort is underway to fix that.

Apple, Google, Bocoup, Microsoft, Mozilla, as well as software consulting companies Bocoup and Igalia, are starting a new initiative called Interop 2022. The project aims to improve interoperability across web browsers, ensuring that all important web features and APIs work the same no matter which web browser you’re using.

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Apple wrote on the WebKit development blog, “Interop 2022 is an evolving metric generated from a set of automated tests that aims to evaluate support for certain web standards that are most important for web developers. The Interop 2022 dashboard will constantly update throughout the year, showing progress as browser engineers fix bugs, implement new features, and improve the tests.”

The new Interop 2022 Dashboard provides scores for different web browsers, based on “how browser engines are doing in 15 focus areas and 3 joint investigation efforts.” The current focus areas are CSS Cascade Layers, color spaces and functions, CSS Containment, the Dialog Element, forms, scrolling, CSS Subgrid, typography and encodings, Viewport Units, and general web compatibility.

Hopefully, the new project will reduce headaches for web developers, and improve the web for everyone. Now that Google Chrome is the most popular web browser, anyone using Firefox or Safari on a regular basis has probably run into a few sites that are broken (or just tell you to use Chrome) due to poor testing or incompatibility issues, but Interop 2022 might reduce those occurrences. The group also plans to add more focus areas as time goes on.

Source: WebKit