Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft, alongside Igalia and Bocoup, have come together to launch the Interop 2022 benchmark, an initiative that aims to improve cross-browser compatibility.
“For the first time ever, all major browser vendors, and other stakeholders, have come together to solve the top browsers compatibility issues identified by web developers,” says Google’s developer team in a blog post.
The goal, as explained by Mozilla developers in their own blog post, is to find common pain points between the main browsers for developers and users, with the goal of fixing them. The result is a public score for each browser.
The initiative started back in 2019, when Google, Mozilla, and others began to a program to understand pain points for web developers. From there, each browser maker had a clearer idea of what was wrong and how to fix it.
Given that each browser has its own core constituency (and all are used by high numbers of people across different platforms), making the experience more unified makes a lot of sense.
Interop 2022
The Interop 2022 initiative will focus on 15 areas, including cascade layers, colour spaces and CSS colour functions, new viewport units, scrolling, subgrid, and the <dialog> element.
Taken together, these represent the biggest pain points for developers and, ultimately, the main reasons that things look weird or don’t work on each browser for the end user.
“The goal of these multi-year interoperability efforts, in the form of Compat 2021, Interop 2022 and much more, is to fully acknowledge and address the pain points developers have experienced through for many years,” says Google.
“And it’s not a one-browser effort but rather a strong collaboration between all major browser vendors and friends for improving the web platform across the board.”
You can read more from Apple and Microsoft about their participation.
