In 2020, Igalia helped create a project called “Compat 2021”, aimed at improving what was, in retrospect, better called “Interoperability”. Compat 2021 helped align and focus specific work across browser engines to eliminate differences between browsers’ support of web features. This effort was so successful that the rebranded and expanded “Interop” project was born.

Every year since, Interop has brought a growing coalition of people from Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft and Mozilla together to work on aligning work toward improving interoperability of web features. This year is no different, and the Interop 2024 project officially launches today. Igalia is proud to once again be a part of this important work.

As we did last year, the Interop team issued an open call for suggestions, and in the end we received more than 100 proposals. While this illustrates the wide scope of the web platform, it also meant the team had to reject something like 80% of the submissions, simply because there isn’t enough time and resources to tackle them all. (Happily, a few proposals were rejected because by the time the team started the selection process, they were already interoperable!) This year, the seventeen collectively agreed-upon areas of focus will be:

• Accessibility
• CSS Nesting
• Custom Properties (CSS)
• Declarative Shadow DOM
• font-size-adjust (CSS)
• HTTPS URLs for WebSocket
• IndexedDB
• Layout (CSS)
• Pointer and Mouse Events
• popover (HTML)
• Relative Color Syntax (CSS)
• requestVideoFrameCallback (JS)
• Scrollbar Styling (CSS)
• @starting-style and transition-behavior (CSS)
• Text Directionality
• text-wrap: balance (CSS)
• URL

This does at first seem like a reduction from last year, which saw 26 areas of focus, but many of this year’s topics are deep and complex, with a number of sub-topics once you dig into them.

The Interop project has been a huge net positive for the web, and we’re excited to see all the progress that will come out of Interop 2024. Read more about Interop and the participants’ views in these posts from our partners:

• Apple
• Boucoup
• Google
• Microsoft
• Mozilla