The companies behind the rendering engines that power all of the biggest web browsers have announced a new initiative called Interop 2022 that’s designed to ensure that websites will look and function the same way no matter what browser you’re using to access them.
Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are all onboard, which means that other browsers that use the Webkit, Blink/Chromium, or Gecko rendering engines should all benefit.
As Mozilla points out, the web is already defined by a set of standards that browser makers can use to ensure their apps can render web pages properly. But that doesn’t mean they’ll all do so in the same way… unless there’s some cooperation.
So Interop 2022 brings the folks behind those browsers together in an effort to focus on 15 areas:
- Cascade Layers
- Color Spaces and Functions
- Containment
- Dialog Element
- Forms
- Scrolling
- Subgrid
- Typography and Encodings
- Viewport Units
- Web Compat
- Aspect Ratio
- Flexbox
- Grid
- Sticky Positioning
- Transforms
The last five in that list are carry-overs from an earlier initiative called Compat 2021 that was a partnership between Microsoft and Google.
The new initiative involves a set of automated tests that can tell you how well each browser meets the interoperability standards overall (or just on a specific focus area). You can see the latest scores at wpt.fyi/interop-2022. Right now no browser gets a perfect score, but you can see how things have already improved significantly since the start of the year, especially when looking at scores for experimental versions of the browsers rather than stable builds.