Chrome’s web predictability effort

dknox@

Topics

• Long-term goals for interop and compat
• Interop roadmap
• Current focus
• Active projects

Long-term vision (bit.ly/predictability-vision)

• Developers only worry about what features are available, never what browser they’re running on.
• Over the years, all features trend towards universal availability or removal.
• Developers are never surprised or significantly hurt by site breakage due to a browser update.

Interop goals (bit.ly/interoperability-roadmap)

• Introduce best practices and tooling to help web platform engineers be good ecosystem citizens when developing new features
• Enable teams/browsers to track their interop debt in order to balance against new feature work
• Integrate testing into the specification and implementation processes

Interop roadmap

• Enable interop discipline within Chromium
• Track + support interop health within Chrome
• Enable interop discipline in standards
• Encourage interop discipline in other browsers
• Track + support interop health across the web

Current focus

• Interop “ratchet” - any gains we make in interop can’t be lost
• Testing infrastructure + cultural shifts
• Process for turning interop issues into bugs on the appropriate browser/spec
• Interop visualization
• Identifying problem areas
• Helping teams weigh interop debt against more concrete metrics
• Experimenting with what interop metrics are sensible to track
• Real-world interop fixes
• Work with large web properties to catalog interop issues they’re facing
• Drive interop across those issues

Active projects

• WPT infra (ecosystem infra team Q3 OKRs)
• Automatic import/export between Chromium ⟺ WPT
• Improvements to the contribution workflow for WPT
• Enabling more test automation in WPT: click automation + Webdriver infra
• Test-driven spec advocacy
• Chromedriver improvements
• Interop visualization
• WPT health dashboard (wpt.fyi)
• API confluence (metrics discussion)

Discussion