Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Standardization of the Webkit

With the rise of webkit in mobile browsers it becomes more and more tempting to drop support for the other browsers altogether. This leads to a problem that other browsers will eventually add de facto support for webkit. You add something with a -webkit prefix to your CSS and the browsers will automatically support it, even if they are not a webkit browser. This is bad. It leads to confusion and chaos. Browsers shouldn't be implementing other browser prefixes. As a developer it is frustrating to have to test in every browser, and then come up with a work around that is not as effective as one would want. But with the standardization of webkit it will be more frustrating to be limited to only webkit browsers when others are better in certain areas. I believe that standardization is not something to be feared, but poor implementation should be. Prefix support is not is not the right way.

1 comment:

  1. I hate to see any one browser become so popular that support for others is dropped. This kills innovation. We will see webkit be the next Internet Explorer.

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