# Compat2021 is something that must have happened more than twenty years ago. However, it is never too late if the bliss is good, so we can stop looking at the past and instead celebrate that the web is finally approaching what it should have been from the beginning. And it is that in an unimaginable move just a few years ago, Microsoft has joined forces with several companies, Google among them, to advance the compatibility of the web and, therefore, of browsers.
With its jump to Chromium, Microsoft tackled the right path in the new browser wars, assuming that it should stand out for the functions and services, not for betting on technologies not compatible with other browsers. And since then his contributions have been more than significant, to the point of having become one of the main drivers of the development and novelties of Chromium, the most used engine today … but not the only one. And precisely, with # Compat2021, it is intended to address the gap that remains open between Chromium and other engines.
To this end, in the context of # Compat2021, it has been established a common compatibility testing framework and, periodically, the compatibility of Chromium, Webkit and Gecko is reviewed with five points that tend to be conflicting: CSS Flexbox , CSS Grid , CSS position: sticky , the aspect ratio property of CSS and CSS transformations. For each of these points, various aspects are reviewed and can add up to 20 points, with the aim of reaching a score of 100.
As we can see, currently the development versions of Chromium and Gecko (the one used by Firefox) they get pretty high scores, which decrease a bit if we review those of their stable versions today. Webkit (Apple Safari), on the other hand, advances more slowly, so we can expect Apple to accelerate in these points if it wants to meet the objectives set by # Compat2021 and, in this way, guarantee the compatibility of the browsers with the standards .
«We are excited to join Google, Igalia, and the wider web community in committing resources in a cross-browser effort called # Compat2021, with the aim of introducing substantial improvements in each area“, We can read on the Microsoft Edge blog, “For this project, our joint working group identified the focus areas above based on feature usage data, the number of errors (or the number of stars / upvotes on a given bug) in the tracking system for each vendor, various survey comments, CanIUse data, and web platform test results”.
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