About

Every single day, developers are building new sites and applications and creating innovative ways for users to consume content on the web. People expect websites to work regardless of the device or browser they are using. Sometimes it can be challenging for website developers to keep up with the countless ways we’re able to browse the internet today—computers, phones, tablets, TVs and more.

This challenge is what we are passionate about. The web is a valuable platform for creation, exploration, and discovery and we believe that everyone should have access to it regardless of device or browser choice. We need your help to make this a reality.

Webcompat.com is developed by volunteers and supported by Mozilla. This site is an open invitation for all web users, developers and browser vendors to get involved in the web compatibility effort. Our goal is to make it easy to report and view compatibility problems for any part of the web.

What is Web Compatibility?

Web compatibility is about making sure web sites work the same way across all browsers and devices.

Sometimes sites have bugs or policies that prevent them from working well in every browser. Sometimes browser vendors have implemented features in different ways. We work to help web developers and site owners identify and fix such issues, or raise the issues to browser vendors or standards bodies to be fixed.

The three part life cycle

Bug Reporting

The first and most critical part of the process is to find and report compatibility issues around the web as we can just fix the issues that we know about.

Have you found something and aren't sure if this is the right place to report that issue? Try to reproduce the issue in another browser. Does it work there? Try again in the first one. Still an issue? Congratulations! You found one. Send it in!

Having steps to reproduce in a bug report is very helpful for everyone who takes care of triage and issue diagnosis.

Bug Triage & Diagnosis

In the next step of the cycle, we take care of the reported bugs. One member of our community tries to reproduce the issue. When they can reproduce it, it moves to diagnosis. They might have an issue reproducing and will come back with questions. If the issue was already reported or is not a web compat issue, it will be closed. Don't forget, every web compat report we get is one we can take care of.

After moving the issue to diagnosis, one member of our community digs into the code to figure out what’s causing the compatibility issue and or files bugs with browser vendors.

Sometimes it might also be possible the relevant web technology standard is underspecified or browsers implement it in different ways. We help to provide feedback and make suggestions to the specifications to make them stable for everyone.

Reaching Out

After finding what is causing the web compat issue, there are different ways to proceed. If the issue is caused by incompatible code, the community tries to contact the site owner or company behind it and suggest a fix.

What else do we do?

Besides of taking care of reported web compatibility bugs, we create tools to make things easier and fix the web. Starting with webcompat.com or our web compatibility reporter add-on and others. There are ways for you to help and contribute, if you are interested. Just let us know!

The web is big and keeps getting bigger. To make sure it's interoperable for everyone we need help from people in all regions of the world. The great thing is anyone can help. You don’t need to be an expert and as little as 5 minutes can make a huge difference!