Since its inception in 2021, the Interop project has brought many improvements to the web platform, which address some of the most important pain points that web developers have been telling us about.
Earlier this year we launched the Interop 2024 project, together with Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, and Mozilla and a lot of work has already gone in. Focus areas such as CSS Nesting, font-size-adjust, HTTPS URLs for WebSocket, requestVideoFrameCallback, @starting-style & transition-behavior, and others have seen big improvements towards interoperability, and are well on their ways to becoming baseline.
Through our various listening channels, we also know that the Interop project isn’t a complete view of all developers’ needs. There are important web platform APIs lacking universal browser support that have not been included in the Interop project, despite keen interest from developers. This is why we published our Edge 2024 web platform top developer needs dashboard, and hope that it helps complete the picture of the most critical gaps in current web platform implementations.
We’re happy that the following areas we’re tracking have improved since we published the dashboard:
- Anchor positioning is now supported in Edge and other Chromium browsers, which allows you to place elements based on the position of other elements. This will massively simplify tooltip positioning and remove the need for using JS-based libraries. We look forward to other browsers adding support for it too.
- The document.caretPositionFromPoint() API is now also implemented in Edge and other Chromium browsers, making it much easier for text editing JS libraries to detect the intended user’s insertion point in text.
- The View Transitions API is coming to Safari, as indicated by the number of WPT subtests that Safari now passes. View Transitions will completely redefine how we think about multi-page site transitions on the web.
- Finally, scrolling to text fragments is coming to Firefox, which means that sharing URLs with highlighted text snippets will soon work in all browsers.
Today we’re excited to start planning next year’s Interop project. Now is not the time to slow down, but instead accelerate towards a highly capable and interoperable platform for all your sites and apps.
Microsoft continues to advocate for transparency in the Interop selection process so that the most important needs are prioritized.
We need your help in identifying the right areas to focus on, which is why the Interop 2025 call for proposals is now open!
Have a focus area you’d like to see included? Please submit it via the submission form. And if you see an existing proposal that resonates with you, show your support by reacting with a thumb up emoji on the issue.
Even if not all proposals make it through the selection process, the information you provide constitutes signals that will help us prioritize the right improvements and fixes for you.
