Web Developer Satisfaction

Web Developer Satisfaction, shortened DevSAT, is a Google project to gather information about the needs of web developers. Our goal is to make sure developers are being heard, know what's happening with their feedback, and see issues being addressed. DevSAT is how we ensure we are focusing on the right areas with our Engineering and Developer Relations work. The goal is a more reliable, predictable, and interoperable web platform, enabling developers to invest in and trust it, and to adopt and use new features to grow the platform and their business.

Ongoing research to understand developer needs

2021 focus on compatibility

Compatibility on the web has always been a big challenge for developers. The goal in 2021 is to eliminate browser compatibility problems in five key focus areas so developers can confidently rely on these areas not having bugs. This effort is called #Compat2021.

You can follow along with the process in the Compat 2021 dashboard to see how each major browser engine is doing in the five areas:

The dashboard and all related bugs are listed at wpt.fyi/compat2021.

The five top compat focus areas in 2021

Here are the areas which are committed to being fixed in 2021, and they are outlined in more detail in Compat2021: Eliminating five top compatibility pain points on the web.

  • CSS Flexbox
  • CSS Grid
  • CSS position: sticky
  • CSS aspect-ratio property
  • CSS transforms

Contributing and following along

Follow any updates on @ChromiumDev or through the Compat 2021 public mailing list. Make sure bugs exist, or file them for issues you have been experiencing, and if there's anything missing, reach out through the above channels.

Testing on the web

In both MDN DNA 2019 and 2020, testing across browsers stood out among the top pain points. To understand this area better, we're collaborating with MDN on further research. The results of this will be published on https://insights.developer.mozilla.org/ at the end of March 2021.

We're already working together with all browser vendors on WebDriver BiDi, a new protocol for browser automation, and on using WebDriver BiDi in Puppeteer. This will allow Puppeteer to support more browsers on more platforms, and will enable other popular test and automation tools to do the same. We believe this is a crucial first step to making it easier to test all browsers you need to support. To follow and contribute to this work, consider joining the Browser Testing and Tools Working Group.

Follow this space!

We will continually update this page to share more efforts and work as they are underway!