That paints a negative pictures of Safari, but it’s not terribly hard to picture a positive picture as well, pointing to years and years of accelerated releases, forging ahead on useful platform features. Seeing cross-document View Transitions get released so quickly after starting life as a Chrome-led project, for instance, to me is a great thing. I have doubts that there is an actual internal conspiracy at Apple to keep the web down, while at the same time wishing they’d loosen up the iOS browser choice restrictions and invest even more in Safari development.

There is a meta conversation of “Web Components are very definitely going to be around 10 years from now while any JavaScript framework today will not” is worth considering, but pits the two directly against each other when we really don’t need to.

In Chrome, these APIs are built to run inference against Gemini Nano with fine-tuning or an expert model. Designed to run locally on most modern devices, Gemini Nano is best for language-related use cases, such as summarization, rephrasing, or categorization.

It’s an API most, with methods you call and get responses. Raymond Camden had a look:

const model = await window.ai.createTextSession();
await model.prompt("Who are you?");

// I am a large language model, trained by Google.

Using AI in this way means 1) it’s fast (no network trip) 2) it works offline 3) it’s private (maybe) 4) it’s free to use.

I admit that’s awfully compelling. I suspect this will happen and will be very highly used.

Don’t we need to think about standards here though? What if Apple ships window.ai.instantiateIntelligence() with an .ask() method? And Firefox ships navigator.llm('dolly').enqueueQuery()? I’d just like to remind everyone that when browser just ship whatever and compete on proprietary features, everybody loses.

• Accessibility
• CSS Nesting
• Custom Properties
• Declarative Shadow DOM
• Font size adjust
• HTTPS URLs for WebSocket
• IndexedDB
• Layout
• Pointer and Mouse Events
• Popover
• Relative Color Syntax
• requestVideoFrameCallback
• Scrollbar Styling
• @starting-style and transition-behavior
• Text Directionality
• text-wrap: balance
• URL

A little while back I measured the “popular vote” on features based on positive GitHub emoji reactions on the threads.

So! How well did what was actually chosen stack up to the popular vote? Let’s see.

• #5) Popover
• #12) CSS Nesting
• #10) Relative Color Syntax
• #26) text-wrap: balance
• #22) Declarative Shadow DOM
• #33) Accessibility — This is a grouping of several, so I took the highest on the list.
• (Not on list) Custom Properties
• #52) Scrollbar Styling — scrollbar-gutter was actually #9, but styling I feel like is a different concern and more aligned with scrollbar-width, which is shipping in Chrome you should know.
• #53) @starting-style and transition-behavior
• #62) URL
• #81) Font size adjust
• #84) HTTPS URLs for WebSocket
• #83) IndexedDB
• #89) requestVideoFrameCallback
• (Not on list) Layout
• (Not on list) Pointer and Mouse Events
• (Not on list) Text Directionality

Interesting results I’d say! It’s kind of all over the map.

By no means to I expect the final results to map perfectly, or at all, to the popular vote. I’m sure there are a million considerations, not the least of which is how ready any of the proposals even is for interop work. For instance, as excited as I am about View Transitions, they are only implemented in Chrome, so it’s not exactly “interop” work when the implementations to compare don’t even exist. Interop is more about shoring up the cracks in existing implementations with testable results.

So as far as “making existing implementations work better together”, I’d say this is a pretty nice list.

I’d say I’m most excited about popover, since it’s such a common UI pattern you gotta love seeing the web platform help with that. And most surprised by the relative color syntax. I absolutely love the syntax, but I thought it had petered out for some reason so it’s delighting to see it come back to life in a way that’ll nearly guarantee we have it cross-browser.

We’ve already seen the list of proposals. Just for kicks, I went through the whole list and tally’d up the amount of positive-emoji reactions to each one (so stuff like 👍, ❤️, and 🚀, but no votes for negative or ambivalent reactions). This is to get a sense of the “popular vote” of what any random developer thinks of the proposals. I left a few reactions myself and had my own votes a while back.

The “Votes”

I have no idea if these “votes” will be heavily weighted by the decision makers. But at least now we’ll be able to compare what was chosen to what seemed to be the popular vote.

What else?

This isn’t a list of everything possible they could work on, although it’s a pretty nice list. One I was thinking about is the Contact Picker API, as I got an email from an old friend wondering about how one might do such a thing on a website these days. It’s a pretty nice API, but it’s isolated to just Chrome on Android right now, which is a bummer. But alas, not happening in Interop 2024 (not that support work might not truck anyway).

What are your thoughts?

If you were the final choice for Interop 2024, what would you pick?