Summary Both in the 2019 MDN Developer Needs Assessment and historically we’ve seen that by far the biggest challenge for web developers is with regards to browser compatibility. We wanted to learn exactly what areas and features are causing this pain, and importantly what we can do to alleviate these, or even make them go away. To be able to do that we have aimed to provide as much detail and extensive reporting as possible to create a foundation for browser vendors to gain an understanding of the issues and offer them a starting point with as much actionable feedback as possible. We found that a lot of developers are struggling in particular with layout and styling issues: CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid and problems achieving consistent layout in recent browsers with dynamic viewport sizes and scrolling. JavaScript was often mentioned, but turned out not to be problems with the core language and instead numerous challenges with achieving browser compatibility with various Web APIs. We heard about challenges with all major web browsers, and the largest number of compatibility challenges were reported for Internet Explorer and Safari. By preemptively sharing initial findings with browser vendors and working closely with engineering teams, we’ve already seen concrete results and improvements regarding:
● CSS Flexbox and Grid improvements in Chromium and WebKit ● Commitment to improved browser compatibility data on MDN
WIth Chromium-based Edge rolling out with Windows updates we believe reported issues with Microsoft Edge Legacy and Internet Explorer will decrease. We further plan to run the MDN Developer Needs Assessment survey again to both surface new issues and see if existing ones have been addressed, and establish an even closer collaboration between browser vendors to ensure compatibility for a better platform for web developers.
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