Vendor prefixes didn’t work. The theory was sound. It was a way of marking CSS and JavaScript features as being experimental. Developers could use the prefixed properties as long as they understood that those features weren’t to be relied upon.
That’s not what happened though. Developers used vendor-prefixed properties as though they were stable. Tutorials were published that basically said “Go ahead and use these vendor-prefixed properties and ship it!” There were even tools that would add the prefixes for you so you didn’t have to type them out for yourself.
Browsers weren’t completely blameless either. Long after features were standardised, they would only be supported in their prefixed form. Apple was and is the worst for this. To this day, if you want to use the clip-path property in your CSS, you’ll need to duplicate your declaration with -webkit-clip-path if you want to support Safari. It’s been like that for seven years and counting.
Like capitalism, vendor prefixes were one of those ideas that sounded great in theory but ended up being unworkable in practice.
Still, developers need some way to get their hands on experiment features. But we don’t want browsers to ship experimental features without some kind of safety mechanism.
The current thinking involves something called origin trials. Here’s the explainer from Microsoft Edge and here’s Google Chrome’s explainer:
- Developers are able to register for an experimental feature to be enabled on their origin for a fixed period of time measured in months. In exchange, they provide us their email address and agree to give feedback once the experiment ends.
- Usage of these experiments is constrained to remain below Chrome’s deprecation threshold (< 0.5% of all Chrome page loads) by a system which automatically disables the experiment on all origins if this threshold is exceeded.
I think it works pretty well. If you’re really interested in kicking the tyres on an experimental feature, you can opt in to the origin trial. But it’s very clear that you wouldn’t want to ship it to production.
That said…
You could ship something that’s behind an origin trial, but you’d have to make sure you’re putting safeguards in place. At the very least, you’d need to do feature detection. You certainly couldn’t use an experimental feature for anything mission critical …but you could use it as an enhancement.
And that is a pretty great way to think about all web features, experimental or otherwise. Don’t assume the feature will be supported. Use feature detection (or @supports in the case of CSS). Try to use the feature as an enhancement rather than a dependency.
If you treat all browser features as though they’re behind an origin trial, then suddenly the landscape of browser support becomes more navigable. Instead of looking at the support table for something on caniuse.com and thinking, “I wish more browsers supported this feature so that I could use it!”, you can instead think “I’m going to use this feature today, but treat it as an experimental feature.”
You can also do it for well-established features like querySelector, addEventListener, and geolocation. Instead of assuming that browser support is universal, it doesn’t hurt to take a more defensive approach. Assume nothing. Acknowledge and embrace unpredictability.
The debacle with vendor prefixes shows what happens if we treat experimental features as though they’re stable. So let’s flip that around. Let’s treat stable features as though they’re experimental. If you cultivate that mindset, your websites will be more robust and resilient.