My top picks for Interop 2027

I love the Web platform, and it’s a provilege that we, the web community, get a chance to influence what browser makers work on every year.

For the second year in a row, Firefox has created a page that allows us to rank the Interop 2027 features that we care about the most. Hopefully this is becoming a yearly tradition.

Ranking our favorite features gives the Firefox team data they can use when reviewing which proposals should be taken on in Interop 2027: a yearly project with the goal to increase the interoperability of key features of the web platform across browsers—a dream come true for people who build the web.

I’ve been seeing some of my web friends blog about their rankings. (I’ve shared links to the blog posts I’ve seen and read at the end of this post.) So, instead of just posting about my top choices on social media, I decided to join in with a short blog post—a chance to breathe some life into this blog again, with more blog posts scheduled to come soon.

My choices are primarily based on a feature’s intended use cases/outcome; and my favorite features are the ones that allow us to improve both our websites’ user experience (UX and accessibility) and our developer experience (DX) at the same time.

Here are the features I am looking forward to the most and that I hope make it to Interop 2027. Only the first three are ranked. I don’t necessarily have a ranking preference for the remaining ones; they all got a vote from me and would sure be great to see them supported across browsers next year:

My picks

The HTML focusgroup attribute.
The ariaNotify() API.

Both of the above features—when used correctly and responsibly—enable us to improve the accessibility of our user interfaces and reduce the amount of work we need to do manually ourselves to achieve that.

The HTML headingoffset and headingreset attributes and the CSS :heading() pseudo-class (a whole package, yay!)
Interest Invokers. Another native HTML feature that will allow us to hopefully create more accessible common UI patterns.
CSS border-shape property. I can’t wait to ditch the old hacks when creating simple borders shapes for a simpler and more standard approach.
CSS interpolate-size and calc-size(). We’ve been waiting for these for wayyyy too long.
Allow CSS transitioning/animating display and content-visibility—for all those nifty UX-improving animations on common UI patterns and components like dialogs.
Customizable/stylable <select>. This one’s long overdue.
CSS gap decorations. Please, thank you!
CSS flex-wrap: balance. More Flexbox magic that’s nice to have.
The CSS corner-shape property. Because well you know. Nice corners are nice to have and can be tricky to create.
CSS reading-flow and reading-order properties. If we get a way to break user expectations in a page layout, we must get a way to undo the effect of said ways.
CSS object-view-box property. I’ve long wanted to control HTML images the same way I can control SVG images using the SVG viewBox attribute and this is the closest we’re getting to that!
CSS @counter-style. A nice little customisation touch to our lists.
Responsive iframes. Another long-overdue feature on the web.

We don’t get to downvote features. The ranking page states that if there are features you don’t know or even feel negatively about, leave them unranked.

There are a few features I frankly don’t care for. Some that I don’t know about. And one or two that I feel negatively about.

Other people’s picks

Favorite picks are subjective and tend to stem from our experience and professional needs and wishes. I loved reading what some of my friends have chosen and why. Here are Interop 2027 rankings from: