Interop 2026 is announced. Apple, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla have agreed on twenty areas of the web platform where the browsers will work to behave the same way this year. The list includes anchor positioning, container style queries, dialogs and popovers, scroll-driven animations, view transitions, the Navigation API, scoped custom element registries, scroll snap, the shape() function, and WebTransport.
I think the useful way to read this list is backwards. Every area on it is a place where a front-end team has probably been carrying something: a polyfill, a workaround, a library that papers over a difference between browsers, or a rule that says do not use that feature yet. The Interop list is a public commitment that those differences are going to close, with a scoreboard that updates all year.
My view is that a team should turn the list into a plan with dates. For each area that touches their code, note what is being carried today, and set a point in the year to check the score and remove it. Dependencies that exist only to smooth over browser differences are weight, and this is the year some of them become unnecessary.
Which workaround in your codebase exists only because two browsers disagreed, and is it on this list?
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