WebKit. Killing the open web since 1998.
Fast releases and automated updates only make it worse, as two minutes after a prefixed property is thought up, a seriously large number of users will have support for it, developers will play with it and then the css code gets stuck on the internet.
By now most developers are in the mindset that it's okay to let a page differ in some browsers as long as the difference is only minor/aesthetic and not a functional handicap. And matching this vendors are perfectly happy with letting developers use prefixed properties as if they were stable.
Since these vendors make up the whatwg and w3c, they need to get their shit together and standardize faster and in the meantime developers need incentives to only use prefixed properties on test sites, which could be as simple as a console message that it should be removed (like how they did with the event.layerx deprecation) or having the user enable test mode in their browser configuration.
Well, if they're writing standards compliant code it's fine if the page is different in different browsers, but I take your point that developers are happy to write non-standards compliant code to provide extra functionality for a few users.
> in the meantime developers need incentives to only use prefixed properties on test sites,
Maybe search engines need to provide boosts for standards-compliance and drops for standards-ignorance.
There're some prefixed properties which work on all major browser since forever (on a web scale)... but there're still a draft. Reading the minutes of the CSS group is enlightening : everything is really really slow.
Moreover, lots of non-defined prefixed properties don't break pages at all. Rounded corners per exemple are nice, but not displaying them is not a deal breaker. Same thing for transitions : site using them often provide a javascript fallback for non webkit browser.
If Opera wants to support webkit properties, they have to spoof their UA : lots of mobile website are designed for iPhone and Androïd (yes, that's not ideal, but it's a fact). It's the 00's mess again...
The only thing the prefix system threatens is a few unimportant browsers that arguably shouldn't even be around anymore and the pride of the w3c.
And you want to save them, by throwing the future of the web under a bus?
For example: webkit devs think of a new property. They build it, they like it, they make it publicly available. Chrome guys enable using this in the dev and beta channel. In a couple weeks they have feedback on performance and stuff. Whatwg convenes, they finalize the details, webkit guys make a few adjustments (and it's fine because there's only 2 webpages on the entire internet that's been using it for a month tops) and then soon it hits the stable channel. This is what we need. Fast updating browsers could rape the benefits of such a system very nicely, fast updating is what we need to let the web evolve fast enough anyway. Slow updating browsers can go die in a fire, they are just as slow with supporting everything else.
Also, not to nitpick, but opera on the mobile front isn't unimportant. It's the only alternative to webkit, it's nearly ubiquitous and not a bad experience on mobile.
This mostly isn't their fault. The main problem is that if any single implementation becomes dominant, we get these problems. And WebKit is dominant on mobile. For the browser market to be healthy again in mobile, we just need more diversity.
But there is also some blame on the WebKit browsers. If, seeing they were about to become dominant in mobile, they had stopped including experimental prefixed functionality in stable release versions, we would not have this problem. Prefixed stuff is not so bad in release versions if there is diversity in the market, but when the market is dominated, it becomes a mess.
Based on this theory, MSIE should not have added new features to IE when it was dominant. This means no AJAX.
Lazy developers caused this problem, and Mozilla/Opera are only going to make it worse by supporting the -webkit- prefixed properties.
They include "experimental" features just like other browser vendors do. It's hardly their fault that lazy developers only use the -webkit prefixed property.
Apple: We'd like some 3D transform properties for making cool websites for phones!
W3C: We'll have a draft ready by 2020.
Apple: Yea, we'll do our own thing.
Users choice of broken browsers should not, repeat not, be allowed to destroy or hold back the web. The web is too important.