interop VS standards-positions

There is popular demand (including from Adobe https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/430#iss... ), which is arguably evidence against (2).

Microsoft Edge does support AV1, but weirdly only through a Microsoft Store extension [1], even though Chrome has support built-in. This actually really sucks because in practice hardly any normal consumers would bother to install a strangely named extension, and so web developers have to assume it's largely unsupported in Edge. Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid accidental battery drain from using a software codec, and means eventually in some year's time support can generally be relied upon when enough new hardware is in use. But that won't happen with Edge as things stand!

I think it's high time the web had a single audio and video codec choice that was widely supported, which is why I've proposed support for AV1 and Opus for the Interop 2024 effort [2] [3].

[1] https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/av1-video-extension/9MVZQV...

[2] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/485

[3] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/484

This is the comment to read:

https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/430#iss...

It got me drooling for JPEG XL like I never did for WebP or HEIC.

The Interop group describe this focus area as: "enable testing for font stack capabilities and enable additional expressiveness with vector color fonts. (Font feature detection and palettes)".

I would say that overall InterOp 2022 went well, they completed most of what they planned to do. Of the 15 focus areas, 13 focus areas had an InterOp score of over 80%.

Interop 2023 is under development, the project timeline states that a public announcement will be made this week. 🤞

https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#ios-saf...

And

https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#evidenc...

Make sure you tap more comments to see the examples.

The number one issue for building native like apps is this https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/84

It has been buggy for as long as I can remember and never been fixed.

Not to mention the 10 years of issues with indexeddb or the issues with WebRTC.

Open Web Advocacy has been very clear that they want competition on iOS, not Chrome specifically. The reason being that the absence of competition is currently allowing Apple to deteriorate the web experience on iOS, preventing the web and web apps from competing with native apps. Their objective is to lift these artificial limitations imposed by Apple and free the web.

OWA members have actually been actively reporting WebKit bugs and interacting with the Safari team to help prioritise features and bug fixes on Twitter and elsewhere, showing the goal is to improve the overall web experience on iOS, not let Chrome to become dominant. Here is one of their detailed bug report: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84.

Container Queries and Subgrid are only available in Safari Technology Preview, not stable, and Firefox has actually been supporting Subgrid for more than 2 years. Because CQ is not supported by either Chrome of Firefox, it will be at least 2 years before we can start actually using it.

It would have been much wiser for Safari to catch up on the dozens of features they don't support that both Chrome and Firefox do, or to focus on bug fixes for the most basic features that's been broken for years. Instead, they chose to ship shiny new ones to try and convince both regulators (from the EU, UK, US, etc) and web developers that they are leading the way in feature adoption. Unfortunately this seems to be working to some extent in the web devs community. Regulators are unlikely to fall for it though.

Here is the 7 years old scrolling bug I'm referring to, which prevents any decent implementation of modals in Safari on iOS: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84

Here you can see that Safari has 5 times more API failures (representative of both missing features and bugs) than Chrome, and 3 times more than Firefox: https://wpt.fyi/

You can read through the conversations to understand more of the context

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100#is...

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336

The main struggle is around giving informed consent that explains the risks. Understandably, browsers don't want to ship a "Set my printer on fire" button.

You can check why Mozilla and Apple have opted to not support this.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/28

Neither Mozilla or Webkit are satisfied that the proposal is safe by default, and contains footguns for the user that can be pretty destructive.

FWIW Mozilla updated their position on Web Serial API to "neutral" and clarified that they might be okay with enabling the API with an add-on.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webserial

Allowing serial but not HID would be really strange. With HID you get standard identifiers that let you filter out devices that are too dangerous for the web. With serial you get nothing. Even if you know a device is dangerous, there's no way to protect users from it.

Hasn't FireFox been dragging their asses on @scope? https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

It took years to just convince them of the need for it. And I'm not sure anyone got convinced vs Chrome had already shipped it and Safari has it planned so they caved in.

Hard to believe FireFox used to be a leader of the modern web.

As mentioned by others, OK idea, but not a fan that this isn't standardized. After a quick search+peruse, these seem to indicate that it's not around the corner either. Happy (/hope) to be corrected.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4180

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/990

Mozilla's position on these specs is nicely outlined publicly and transparently as part of their standards-positions project: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100

I'm kinda glad it's not implemented in my browser, to be honest, because the whole thing seems like a security nightmare.

It's a shame it impacts some hobby usecases, but I don't think this outweighs the reasoning set out on the GitHub issue.

This should have big warnings on it. Some of these are not web standards; they are features implemented unilaterally by Google in Blink that have been explicitly rejected by both Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds.

Take Web Bluetooth, for example:

Mozilla:

> This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.

— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

Apple:

> Here are some examples of features we have decided to not yet implement due to fingerprinting, security, and other concerns, and where we do not yet see a path to resolving those concerns

— https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/

This is Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish bullshit applied to the web platform by Google. Google keeps implementing these things despite all other major rendering engines rejecting them, convinces people that they are part of the web, resulting in sites like this, then people start asking why Firefox and Safari are “missing functionality”. These are not part of the web platform, they are Google APIs that have been explicitly rejected.

Is BLE a PWA requirement? I think they explained their position pretty well here, regardless of whether I agree:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...

I took a glance at Can I Use what the difference between the last public release of Firefox and Chrome is [1] and they don't really have that big of a difference in the eyes of normal use-cases? Some of these aren't implemented purely because of privacy reasons, the proposals aren't finished yet or complexity [2].

Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].

Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?

[1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+120%2Cfirefox+121&compar...

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

[3] https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-seemingly-intentionally-...