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Comment by aiiane | Hacker News Reader

Technically, web developers should never had to have worried about writing code with prefixes - prefixed properties were never intended to be used for production apps. :)

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Yeah right. web devs (and sadly also other devs) are like magpies, always hunting for that latest shiny to add to their nest.

Border radius with prefixes instead of with images felt elegant and simple and not shiny at the time (relative to what we were replacing).

Yeah. 4 - 5 lines of CSS far out strips 4 corner images and several extra divs, the typical implementation.

Agreed, I would also say it's often not just the devs who build the requirements, hard to say something is impossible / not a good idea to implement when it's everywhere.

And all those hours spent on A List Apart's "sliding door" tutorial for rounded corners

The problem is that "production" can have varying levels of tolerance to cutting edge features depending on who the audience is. Sometimes you know all your people are Chrome users, or IE10 users, or developers with the latest browsers, etc.

And then it stays in production way way beyond the life time of your target audience, and we have ourself a IE6 situation all over again...

We do, it's the IE9 situation!

I was looking at our browser metrics the other day and it's yet to drop below the arbitrary 5% usage figure we use to fully deprecate browser support. We are a public facing site, and not particularly niche.

It's hovering around there, but if a user is still clinging to ie9 it's highly likely they don't have the ability or requirement to upgrade.

When ie9 legacy support drops my biggest headache will be ie10's squiffy flexbox support.

IE9 is the highest available on Vista, and Vista is still in extended support until April 11, 2017.

I'm planning a party for that date.

Having to support ie10 isn't the worst thing in the world. I was surprised when it was released because it was the first time I had ever marked up a page and it worked across all 4 browsers almost pixel perfect without any hacks or tweaks.

You should only really need to worry about IE10 if you have users on Windows Server 2012 baseline, whom should have likely already upgraded to R2 or more recent. Lifecycle support jumps to 11 on most OSes, yay!

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I...

If only :(

IE10 is a non-trivial portion of our desktop traffic, not to mention Trident's hateful mobile incarnation, which still turns up from time to time.

The problem is not the tolerance to cutting edge, it's that the original point of prefixed properties was they were unstable and could be changed slightly or completely. Once you've shipped to production that's dead, there's no guarantee you'll update it.

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