Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla work together to improve web development standards
Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are working together to improve the web standards used in browsers and devices. It might sound like a cool superhero crossover episode, but this isn’t the first time the browser giants have pooled resources, they started working together back in 2019.
Last year, the 4 browser manufacturers collaborated for the Compat 2021 conference. This time, the alliance will be called Interop 2022, derived from the word interoperability.
Why is this important?
When a website tries to prevent access to a particular browser by saying something like, this site looks better in Chrome. Or “use a modern browser”, and providing links to browsers you don’t use is annoying. You can usually fix this problem by spoofing the user agent, either by using a plugin or by changing a preference in the program’s settings. That’s not very complicated, but think about this.
Have you ever come across a website that doesn’t work properly in a browser? It may load slowly, appear broken, or use a lot of resources when rendering the page. But when you try to access the portal from a different browser, it might load just fine. In such scenarios, the problem is not on the user’s side per se. People jokingly blame web developers for these errors and say that they did not code/test the site properly, to check if it is compatible with all modern browsers. Many users claim that YouTube works better in Chromium browsers than Firefox. Similarly, you may have noticed a difference in performance on other sites.
What is Interoperability 2022?
However, the problem is not that simple, there is also the issue of device and operating system compatibility that one should consider. A website must work properly on all major platforms Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS. Coding a website to support all of these standards takes a lot of effort and time.
This is one of the concerns that the browser alliance aims to address. Tech giants want to make things easier for developers by establishing universal web standards, which will allow them to code their apps and websites to work across browsers and platforms.
Interop 2022 provides a benchmark that rates the performance of Chrome/Edge, Firefox, and Safari in tests covering 15 different web performance areas, including Cascading Layers, Color Spaces and Features, Containment, Dialog Element, Forms, Scrolling , subgrid, typography and encodings, viewport. Units and Web Compat.
There’s no winner or loser here because it’s not a competition, the tests are meant to point out where a browser needs to improve, compared to the others. If you’re curious about the numbers, head over to the Web Platform Test Dashboard on the Interop 2022 website and review the results.
Computer world mentions that Apple does not allow iOS applications to use its own browser engine. As a result of this restriction, all browsers on the App Store, including Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, use Safari’s Webkit-based engine. This is one of the concerns that the developers have raised. Hopefully this will change in the future.
If you’re interested in technical data, read the blog articles that have been posted on Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft’s websites.
advertising
