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Comment by nerdy | Hacker News Reader

It seems they agree the existing state of affairs isn't acceptable, but don't agree about how to proceed.

Consider Mozilla's perspective... they're trying to refocus on Firefox[1] and immediately after they find a suitable place for Thunderbird[2] they release support for WebKit prefixes while Apple announces dropping the same prefixes. Not only does this mean Mozilla arguably wasted time, it also means they'll have this prefix code as an artifact for some time while it becomes increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, it makes Firefox seem antiquated while the floor falls out from under its user base[3].

1. http://news.softpedia.com/news/mozilla-wants-to-ditch-thunde... 2. http://news.softpedia.com/news/two-foundations-are-willing-t... 3. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

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> It seems they agree the existing state of affairs isn't acceptable, but don't agree about how to proceed.

They completely agree how to proceed, Firefox and Chrome both moved to using feature flags instead of vendor prefixes a while back, but there are so many -webkit- prefixed "advanced" properties in the wild, and developers only testing their site in Chrome (which hasn't removed the old prefixed properties for compatibility reasons) that Mozilla felt compelled to add support for these. Incidentally, they're following Opera[0] and Microsoft[1] in doing so.

> while Apple announces dropping the same prefixes

Apple didn't announce dropping support for existing prefixed properties (at best they noted that they may remove some over time depending on compatibility needs), only that new features will be gated instead of prefixed going forwards.

> it also means they'll have this prefix code as an artifact for some time while it becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Prefixed properties are just specific names, the vendor prefix is incidental, Mozilla implemented and enabled a bunch of properties named -webkit-{something} instead of {something}.

[0] http://www.sitepoint.com/opera-css3-webkit-prefix/

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt270097%28v=vs.85%...

As I understand it, WebKit's feature flags will not include the webkit prefix:

"WebKit’s new policy is to implement experimental features unprefixed"

But Mozilla still plans for experimental features to be prefixed:

"Mozilla supports a number of extensions to CSS that are prefixed with -moz-.

Some of these properties have been included in draft CSS specification for inclusion in the final recommendation, but are still experimental... Once standardized, and the support for the un-prefixed variant added, the prefixed properties are dropped."

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. The webkit quote indicates that new experimental features will be unprefixed and behind flags, which is already the policy at Mozilla. For instance as of Firefox 46 (release channel) "grid" is unprefixed (there is no -moz-grid[0]) but behind a flag (layout.css.grid.enabled).

> But Mozilla still plans for experimental features to be prefixed:

The quote doesn't support your interpretation, it only indicates that there are -moz-prefixed experimental properties, just as there are -webkit-prefixed experimental properties.

[0] well there is a display: -moz-grid value for display but it's a historical XUL property unrelated to the CSS Grid Layout module: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=616605#c10

Obviously the solution is vendor-specific suffixes! /joke attempt

Abso-bloomin'-lutely not. :) Vendor-specific infixes...

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