Google, Microsoft and Others Form Browser Compatibility Initiative

[engine]

Google and Microsoft and others join forces to improve web browser compatibility with Compat2021 initiative.

The project will focus on five areas web developers struggle with when attempting to create a consistent experience across browsers using core web layout, forms and animation tools. These include: CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid, CSS position: sticky, the CSS aspect-ratio property, and CSS transforms.

[zdnet.com...]

[JorgeV]

Hello,

It would have been easier to simply follow the W3C standards right from the beginning, instead of trying to do fancy things...

[engine]

I complete agree JorgeV, and the browser makers seem to want to ignore the standards to suit their own needs. They should be working with W3C on new standards, imho.

[JorgeV]

This reminds me the old good times, when, some webmasters, where showing a big banner saying "this site is better viewed with IE" to Netscape users,... as if a visitor will adopt a different browser, because one site will look better with it ...

By the way, at the end, Google will say, "listen, the Chrome engine represents the biggest market share, Microsoft uses it too, so let's just all use it, and let refine standards to match Chrome's rendering, instead of the opposite. It's easier"

[lammert]

If we would let everything define by W3C, we would still all drive in a Lada. Commercial companies have more resources to make better products in a shorter time-frame and seek the edges of current technologies. That may lead to some incompatibilities from time to time, but better that, than no progress at all.

[engine]

That's true, Lammert, however, if they worked with W3C it couldhave moved forward. I agree, it can be very slow, and that needs addressing. The result is what we have now, and this new initiative is, once again, fragmenting and not all encompassing.

[Marshall]

Google and Microsoft and others join forces to improve web browser compatibility with Compat2021 initiative.

But trying to be compatible with multiple browsers is half the fun :)

[lammert]

We have to stop thinking of a browser as a flat representation device to pixel-perfect display HTML files. In that view W3C standards make perfectly sense. But that was the case 15 years ago, not anymore. A modern browser is a multi-tasking power-horse. If you have the time to jump in what web workers or WebGL can do, you'll instantly understand that HTML rendering defined by W3C only scratches the surface of what a browser is capable of.

With WebGL it is easy to mimic a lot of the core Photoshop functionality. Web workers are so powerful that cryptojackers use it to turn your browser in crypto-mining tools. In that light, browser vendors are the ones to set the future IMHO. They know the potential power of the browser, and they have the resources to implement it.

Writing specs on paper is nice, but it doesn't move the needle. If Google didn't start with their experimental SPDY protocol, we wouldn't have had HTTP/2. And honestly, I'll never want to go back to HTTP/1.1

Let those corporations try. Let them fail. But if for every nine failures there is one success, the whole online world benefits from it.

What limits us webmasters is the fear that we once again have to adapt our applications to a new standard. I understand, I have been through that a few times. First with the conversion of <font> and <table> tags to CSS. Then the conversion from static CSS layout to responsive CSS. I remember the HTML4.01 vs XHTML war which ended by retiring both standards and switching to HTML5. We'll go through that a few more times in the next decade I am afraid, but the end-result will be worth it.