Apple is taking suggestions on how to overhaul Safari — here’s what’s on the table

If you’ve ever opened a website on your iPhone and found buttons sitting on top of each other, only to check the same page in Chrome and see that everything works perfectly, Apple wants to know about it.

The WebKit team has opened public submissions for Interop 2027, the yearly project that brings Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla together to tackle the annoying differences that still crop up between browsers.

In a post on the WebKit blog, Apple’s Yulun Wu encouraged developers to help “shape the future of web interoperability,” describing the effort as a way to make the web platform better for everyone.

For those unfamiliar with the project, Interop has had a pretty tangible impact over the years. It’s one of the reasons web developers don’t have to deal with quite as many broken layouts, missing features and those lovely “best viewed in Chrome” messages that used to be everywhere.

Apple’s latest push also follows the release of Safari 27 (currently in beta), which addressed a long list of lingering layout problems. The update involved rewriting decades-old code and included more than 1,000 bug fixes.

Meanwhile, Apple has also been gradually trying to make life easier for developers. One example is its newer AI-focused testing tools, which let coding assistants inspect web pages directly within Safari tabs rather than leaving developers to figure everything out manually.

There are some limits to what can make it into Interop 2027, though. Apple isn’t simply asking developers to throw every browser feature idea they’ve ever had into a GitHub issue.

The submission guidelines call for mature standards and automated tests, with proposals expected to be specific, stable, useful and backed by enough evidence to show that they’re worth tackling across browsers.

Wu also has a warning for anyone submitting an issue: don’t assume the people reviewing it will automatically understand why it matters. Developers are being asked to “take the time needed to fully make your case” and provide the evidence to back it up.

Submissions are open on GitHub until September 23, so there’s still time to flag a particularly stubborn browser problem or add your support to an existing proposal.

So if Safari keeps breaking a site you use regularly, this is actually a pretty good opportunity to complain about it. Just remember to make your complaint specific and backed up with evidence.

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