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.
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)
Is vendor prefixing really worse than UA sniffing Paul? Your employer is one of the worst offenders of the latter (not blaming you). Maps, for example, falls back to a very primitive version in Firefox Mobile despite it being perfectly capable of rendering the more advanced site.
My attitude is that if you don't want to test on anything other than Safari Mobile and Android Browser then fine, don't test, but let the site degrade gracefully or not on other browsers.
What would happen in the situation that a browser has developed a non-prefixed property, which later becomes a standard, but with different functionality?
I know everyone talks about fragmentation concerns, and WebKit as the new IE6, but does this argument really make any sense? Internet Explorer was a poorly updated, closed source product that only worked on a single platform; WebKit is open source, maintained by two separate companies (that are basically locked in a cold war), and is available on all major platforms. If anything, why isn't the notion of a single rendering engine to which we can all write a GOOD thing? I know there's lots of idealism around standards, etc, but let's get real here -- most people building a webpage simply want it to render properly and universally, and would like to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies. Agreeing on a single rendering engine seems to be the easiest way of accomplishing this goal.
I've probably missed some killer feature of a multi-engine standards-based ecosystem, but really -- is that the pace at which we want to move the web forward?
A monopoly leads to a lack of innovation. A lack of innovation leads to proprietary solutions. Proprietary solutions lead to a lack of innovation.
This is what happened with Microsoft and IE6. IE6 launched in 2001. Microsoft didn't care updating it for the next 6 years. This lead to a rise of Flash in websites, which at the time seemed like a good solution to fill the lack of support of CSS. But then it also lead to a lack of innovation in Flash, and Adobe never cared about its plugin optimization or security.
WebKit is not controlled by 2 companies and WebKit is not a single rendering engine. WebKit is a single upstream project, the downstream browsers differ from each other just as much as they differ from gecko or presto based browsers.
This is hopefully the moment where things have become so absurd (not a criticism of Opera) that it's time for browsers and standards to tackle the problem e.g. look at the proposed -beta flag.
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.
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.
I've been telling the IE team to do this since IE 9. In reality, the purpose of vendor prefixes is to keep two vendors from using the same name for two distinctly different behaviors. The current prefix model does that.
After a prefixed extension gains market adoption, it serves to indicate which implementation is authoritative. -webkit means you better do it the way webkit does it.
Any browser that won't make use of the author's intent, when that intent is unambiguous and easy to determine, is just shooting itself in the foot.
So now when I create something that requires a browser that actually has good hardware acceleration, it will be a dastardly turd of a performer in Opera.
No, it will continue to be fast on opera and firefox and to be a "dastardly turd" on chrome and safari: only some selected -webkit- properties will be translated by opera.
[+] [-] paulirish|14 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
My attitude is that if you don't want to test on anything other than Safari Mobile and Android Browser then fine, don't test, but let the site degrade gracefully or not on other browsers.
[+] [-] alexchamberlain|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numair|14 years ago|reply
I've probably missed some killer feature of a multi-engine standards-based ecosystem, but really -- is that the pace at which we want to move the web forward?
[+] [-] mcpoulet|14 years ago|reply
This is what happened with Microsoft and IE6. IE6 launched in 2001. Microsoft didn't care updating it for the next 6 years. This lead to a rise of Flash in websites, which at the time seemed like a good solution to fill the lack of support of CSS. But then it also lead to a lack of innovation in Flash, and Adobe never cared about its plugin optimization or security.
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmahemoff|14 years ago|reply
(http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/02/the_vendor_p...)
[+] [-] talmand|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Osiris|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ergo14|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cpeterso|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertnn|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eli|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kogir|14 years ago|reply
After a prefixed extension gains market adoption, it serves to indicate which implementation is authoritative. -webkit means you better do it the way webkit does it.
Any browser that won't make use of the author's intent, when that intent is unambiguous and easy to determine, is just shooting itself in the foot.
[+] [-] Tomis02|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zalew|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iandevlin|14 years ago|reply
I've written a bit more about these "WODs" at http://www.iandevlin.com/blog/2012/04/css/on-vendor-prefixes...
[+] [-] amadeus|14 years ago|reply
So now when I create something that requires a browser that actually has good hardware acceleration, it will be a dastardly turd of a performer in Opera.
[+] [-] ernesth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macco|14 years ago|reply