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Opera confirms support for WebKit vendor prefixes

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Re: Opera confirms support for WebKit vendor prefixes

#2

Post by ergo14 »

What an idiotic move - So now they want to make webkit the next IE of internet?

Standards are standards - period. I see ton of wrong with this approach, or... mabye we should just ignore the w3C CSS Working group.

Vendor prefixes are fine - as long they are used as temporary solution, and no one expects them to be the "default" way of doing things.

Re: Opera confirms support for WebKit vendor prefixes

#3

Post by paulirish »

This is a good thing, and there is basically no way around it.

There is a varying degree of a WebKit monoculture on mobile. Without great site compatibility, users will never successfully switch to a non-webkit browser, but currently much of the great mobile content out there assumes webkit prefixes and userAgent. So Opera, Mozilla, and MS basically need to adopt some of the mobile webkit properties in order to get compatibility, in order to get users. It's either that or advocacy wherein we try to get every site ever to not publish with just WebKit prefixes. But in reality, this advocacy effort has been underway already for over two years and we're still in this bad situation.

Look at the chart linked to from http://paulirish.com/2012/vendor-prefixes-are-not-developer-... When IE10 comes out (or it's complementary mobile browser), less than 25% of all sites that use CSS transitions will have them working in IE10.

Vendor prefixes are bad for us as developers and they're bad for browsers because it leads to situations like these. We'd be in a better situation without them.

BTW, one detail that wasn't really covered: I believe this change is localized to Opera's mobile browsers. Their desktop story is, I think, unchanged.

(All the above is a personal opinion and not that of my employer, yadda yadda)

Re: Opera confirms support for WebKit vendor prefixes

#4

Post by Osiris »

In some ways, I understand the need the vendor prefixes, but they do seem to be causing some fragmentation. I'm getting to the point on some CSS properties that I just use the real CSS name (like border-radius) and don't use the vendor prefixes at all since all the major browers that support radius use the non-prefixed name.

If you all remember back in the IE6 dominated days, Opera was built to the web standards but in order to make it a viable browser for pages that were only tested in IE6, they had to try to emulate IE6 behavior in Quirks mode, and I'm sure Mozilla had to do the same thing.

Hopefully this is a short-term thing unless standards are more finalized and browser implementations become more consistent.

Re: Opera confirms support for WebKit vendor prefixes

#5

Post by robertnn »

ergo14 wrote: post #2

What an idiotic move - So now they want to make webkit the next IE of internet? Standards are standards - period. I see ton of wrong with this approach, or... mabye we should just ignore the w3C CSS Working group. Vendor prefixes are fine - as long they are used as temporary solution, and no one expects them to be the "default" way of doing things.

Lots of people implicitly expects them to be working in the long run. Lots of people will read a tutorial on how to get the cool animation X and the tutorial will only include the -webkit-property, and the reader won't even bother that he is excluding a big part of the users, because he uses only a webkit browser, so he won't notice.

There is something inherently wrong with vendor prefixes as they are used currently. But in the same time they are good if some browser wants to implement a new alpha feature or something.. but they should really not be supported for so much time as they are now.

Re: Opera confirms support for WebKit vendor prefixes

#9

Post by eli »

ergo14 wrote: post #2

What an idiotic move - So now they want to make webkit the next IE of internet? Standards are standards - period. I see ton of wrong with this approach, or... mabye we should just ignore the w3C CSS Working group. Vendor prefixes are fine - as long they are used as temporary solution, and no one expects them to be the "default" way of doing things.

Historically, the standards that have been most successful have been the ones that describe what people are already doing
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