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Flags vs Vendor Prefixes for Experimental CSS

Google recently announced that it will be switching Chrome's rendering engine to a fork of Webkit, called “Blink”. If you're interested, you can read their blog post about Blink.

One of the changes we will be seeing in Blink, is the use of browser flags in place of vendor prefixes.

What this means, is that rather than prefixing experimental CSS with -webkit-, -moz-, -ms-, -o-, -khtml-, etc.; We will be required to enable these attributes using a flag in the browser (like the ones currently at chrome://flags).

If you ask me, both ways have their advantages and disadvantages. Though, in the end, I lean towards the flags over the vendor prefixes, and here's why:

#1 Code Bloat

On average, using CSS with vendor prefixes requires writing it 5 times. Every time you use it.

#2 Future Friendly

Eventually, prefixed code will be replaced by the unprefixed code.

#3 Browser Dev Friendly

Browsers tend to continue to support the prefixed code, even if it doesn't make it to the spec or gets changed. If they didn't, they could break existing sites that relied on this code. This compounds and grows as more experimental features are added, which adds overhead to the browsers and more work for browser devs.

Conclusion

By moving support for experimental (spec not yet approved) CSS into an optional flag in the browser, and supporting only a single version of the code, we may lose the opportunity to expose these features to the masses early, but we gain a much more stable and maintainable environment.

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