This is a nice update from Manuel Rego Casasnovas. Igalia has this idea to sort of crowd-source important web platform features that need to get worked on (that’s the sort of work they do). They call it Open Prioritization. The “winner” of that (the one with the most-pledged dollars) is what they’ll do. That turned out to be :focus-visible support in WebKit (Safari). As I write, people have pledged $29,337.13 of the $35,000 goal, so not bad!
That choice was made in January 2021, and as Manuel was writing in June 2021, it’s basically done because it shipped in Safari Technical Preview 125 meaning it’s in Apple’s hands now. Pretty nice speed for a web feature, and a great one since it will highly encourage proper focus styles rather than that bummer situation where people remove focus styles for aesthetic reasons, hurting accessibility.
And, bonus!
In addition, the WPT test suite has been improved counting now ~40 tests for this feature. Also in January neither Firefox or Chrome were using
:focus-visibleon the UA style sheet, however they both use it there nowadays. Thus, doing the implementation on WebKit has helped to move forward this feature on different places.
It’s a truly amazing and generous initiative, and I’d like to thank all the people involved. Now, is it ok to talk about the elephant in the room?
Yes let’s talk about that thing where we all definitely know what you’re talking about ;)
The most profitable tech company in the world relying on individual donations to implement basic accessibility features in their own products. We often talk about open-source projects being profitable to big corporations while their authors struggle, but this here is another level of weirdness.
I always wonder if Igalia is really helping the web?
They’re doing the work for pennies while the most popular browsers are own by companies valued at 500+ billions of dollars… (Firefox excluded)
Apple’s Safari is the new IE by a very long shot, yet it’s the most valued company on the planet. Isn’t it time for Apple to kick their own rear end and fix all the little stuff developer suffers from their browser?
As long as someone is doing the work for them, like Igalia does, there’s no reason whatsoever for companies to invest more than they already do to fix their problems.
So every time I read about Igalia doing something good, which is always very useful, I can’t shake the feeling that in the long run, we’re gonna lose a lot more…
Thank you for putting into words my own feelings about this. It’s like a gigantic Antipattern for the industry as a whole.
I come not from development but from an Engineering background and to read that this is how at least some features get implemented is just so very very odd, and does not bode well for the future.