Redmond is now a big player! Microsoft and Google have teamed up with the broader web community in an effort to improve compatibility across different web browsers.
This is made possible by the fact that the software titan migrated to the Chromium engine for Edge, which is not only helping Microsoft increase the market share of the default Windows 10 web browser, but also contribute to the development of the underlying technology.
And this is why the company has joined the movement called Compat2021 that will see the stakeholders focus their efforts on five major areas that draw complaints from the developer community.
This is what Microsoft had to say:
“We’re excited to join with Google, Igalia, and the broader web community in committing resources to a cross-browser effort called #Compat2021, with the goal of substantial improvements in each area.
For this project, our joint working group identified the focus areas above based on feature usage data, number of bugs (or number of stars/upvotes on a given bug) in each vendor’s tracking system, various survey feedback, CanIUse data, and test results from web-platform-tests.”
The purpose is to eventually improve web browser compatibility in a way that would not involve the companies themselves, but the entire web communities.
For 2021, the focus will be on these five areas: CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid, CSS sticky positioning, the CSS aspect ratio property, and CSS Transform. Each of these focus areas will be further split among the working group so that they can cook up their respective implementations.
As an example, the Microsoft Edge team intends to contribute fixes to Chromium to pass 100% CSS Grid tests this year, as well as support work to improve interop across browsers.
If you would like to keep up with the progress on feature compatibility regarding these areas, you can do so by pointing your web browser to this here link. As you can see, different web browsers have varying scores when it comes to compatibility.
The Dev versions of Edge and Chrome score the highest at 86, while Firefox Nightly sits behind at 83. Apple Safari preview only has a score of 64.
