In the course of continuing to get my head around CSS earlier today, I was looking up things I could find on vendor prefixes, and came across this page - http://webdesign.about.com/od/css/a/css-vendor-prefixes.htm - and in particular the following line…
But now you really only need the standards version
Recognising that it’s a little out of context when presented like this, it did get me wondering whether we’ll be any more able to remove vendor prefixes from our CSS going forward, than has been possible with hacks and browser specific style sheets for IE6.
Surely, so long as earlier versions of browser that do require the prefix are out there, then we’ll have to keep including them if that’s what are target demographic is using. Would it be naive to think we could remove them any time soon? To me it seems premature to be thinking so.
Vendor prefixes should only stay in your CSS files to help along older browsers which only have the temporary vendor prefixes working. This should of course be overridden by actual CSS later in your file. I.e.
-moz-border-radius:5px;
border-radius;/*If mozilla browsers are updated enough, it will get this instead of vendor prefix*/
Mozilla and Chrome (the main)'s user bases often upgrade quite frequently. There aren’t all that many older versions of these browsers going around.
If it were up to me, I’d simply remove the vendor extensions when appropriate. If border-radius was supported 5 upgrades ago, I might wait a couple months for more users to upgrade, but then I’d have no issues removing them. It all depends on the support available and how critical the application needs the vendor prefixes.
Older browsers / users that fail to upgrade will get a functioanl page, but just without some of the bells and whistles (the foundation of “graceful degradation”.)
It’s not naive to remove vendor extensions; it just depends on what properties you want to remove.
Border-radius? Sure, remove all extensions. IE8 is the only main browser that doesn’t support it. It just depends on the property you want to remove the prefix, browser support currently, what YOU want to support, and how critical it is to your application.