Safari now works a lot like other major browsers when it comes to displaying web content on an iPhone or Mac, after a year-long joint effort to make the online experience similar across the industry.

As people who grew up with Internet Explorer and Netscape can attest, there can be a lot of difference between what one browser displays and what another shows. Thanks to an effort between multiple browser makers, including Apple, the web navigation tools now work a lot more predictably.

As explained in a Friday WebKit blog post, Interop 2025 was the fourth year when browser developers worked to improve the interoperability of browsers. The group, made up of Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla, determined areas where interoperability matters for web developers, and then focused work on those features.

While this is aimed at web developers, the result does impact the end user experience too. With more interoperable browsers, the results of web code should be predictably identical regardless of what browser you use to view it.

For the 2025 cycle, the group selected 19 focus areas as well as 5 investigation areas. This included CSS, JavaScript, Web APIs, and performance in general.

The WebKit team petitioned for focus areas that would require a lot of "engineering investment" from WebKit, the post claims. This was on the belief that its proposals would make the biggest impact for web developers.

A big improvement

To determine how each browser improved, the group selected a collection of tests to check the functionality of each area, and compared at the start of the project and at the end.

At the start of the year, only 29% of the selected tests passed across all browsers. By the end, the score reached a 97% pass rate across Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

When it comes to experimental versions of the browsers, they all hit a 99% pass rate for the tests. This means that the changes in future browser software updates will make the full release versions of the browser more compliant in terms of interoperability.

As for the WebKit team's own work, Safari saw the biggest jump of any browser in the year, from 43% to 99%.

The team said there were three meaningful focus areas for 2025. Anchor positioning allows developers to position popovers, tooltips, and menus relative to other elements using CSS, without using JavaScript positioning libraries.

Same-document View Transmissions refers to smooth animated transitions between user interface states, handled natively within the browser. Support actually shipped in fall 2024 in Safari 18.0 and Safari 18.2.

Lastly, Navigation API is a replacement for a previous system that dealt with navigation handling in single-page applications. This was shipped as part of Safari 26.2.

While the 2025 effort is over, Interop 2026 is already underway. A call for proposals took place in September 2025, and the WebKit team is involved once again.