As of a week ago their pre-alpha version was capable of running my extremely heavy JS+ SVG + worker thread + SSE app, a bit slowly I admit but correctly in all major exercises I tried. So, I'm optimistic. They're doing great.
Separately I wonder if the compatibility job is easier now that you can just give the HTML5 spec to Fable and Bob's your uncle.
But I agree, it's impressive. My blog uses a lot of modern CSS features (such as nested selectors), and this latest version rendered almost perfectly. Much better than Servo. Still, this small gap is often the difference between a normal browser and a browser that is a pain. Safari has much, much better compatibility, but even then this browser is hated for it's quirks, because even much smaller compatibility gaps are quite noticeable.
Safari has much, much better compatibility, but even then this browser is hated for it's quirks
I think this meme has almost run its course.
Funnily enough I just had to fix a Safari layout quirk yesterday (for iOS 16 & 17 devices only). I was excited to pick it up because it had been _so long_ since I had to deal with a CSS-related browser incompatibility. I was nostalgic :')
I raced Claude to fix it. I knew which CSS had the issue, but I needed to set up an iOS simulator to verify my fix. So I had to download xcode, which download 10GB of data for a current simulator and Apple's embedded code-assist model. Then another 8GB for the iOS 16 simulator.
Claude took about 5min to find the right CSS file and then got stuck at the same point as me: needing to simulate it to verify. It just got the old webkit binaries and hacked together its own minimal browserstack clone.
It finished before me because of those downloads, but it only found half the fix. So... I won!
Except...I made a typo (`no-wrap` instead of `nowrap`) and had to do a fixup commit.
The browser might reach 95-97% compatibility eventually. But the last 3-5% gaps are the most stubborn. Many of these 3-5% are not trivial API calls. They might be some subtle legacy quirks, timing/rendering things, etc. There is a lot of poorly written historical code that might be illegal by web standards but browsers are forced to support. Established browsers have decades of patches and regression testing.
That sounds like a reasonable estimate for the gap between any pair of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, just from varied depth of implementation of more recent standards.
Comments
As of a week ago their pre-alpha version was capable of running my extremely heavy JS+ SVG + worker thread + SSE app, a bit slowly I admit but correctly in all major exercises I tried. So, I'm optimistic. They're doing great.
Separately I wonder if the compatibility job is easier now that you can just give the HTML5 spec to Fable and Bob's your uncle.
But I agree, it's impressive. My blog uses a lot of modern CSS features (such as nested selectors), and this latest version rendered almost perfectly. Much better than Servo. Still, this small gap is often the difference between a normal browser and a browser that is a pain. Safari has much, much better compatibility, but even then this browser is hated for it's quirks, because even much smaller compatibility gaps are quite noticeable.
I think this meme has almost run its course.
Funnily enough I just had to fix a Safari layout quirk yesterday (for iOS 16 & 17 devices only). I was excited to pick it up because it had been _so long_ since I had to deal with a CSS-related browser incompatibility. I was nostalgic :')
I raced Claude to fix it. I knew which CSS had the issue, but I needed to set up an iOS simulator to verify my fix. So I had to download xcode, which download 10GB of data for a current simulator and Apple's embedded code-assist model. Then another 8GB for the iOS 16 simulator.
Claude took about 5min to find the right CSS file and then got stuck at the same point as me: needing to simulate it to verify. It just got the old webkit binaries and hacked together its own minimal browserstack clone.
It finished before me because of those downloads, but it only found half the fix. So... I won!
Except...I made a typo (`no-wrap` instead of `nowrap`) and had to do a fixup commit.
So I guess we'll call it a draw :(
The browser might reach 95-97% compatibility eventually. But the last 3-5% gaps are the most stubborn. Many of these 3-5% are not trivial API calls. They might be some subtle legacy quirks, timing/rendering things, etc. There is a lot of poorly written historical code that might be illegal by web standards but browsers are forced to support. Established browsers have decades of patches and regression testing.
That sounds like a reasonable estimate for the gap between any pair of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, just from varied depth of implementation of more recent standards.