This works with Desktop IE9, Desktop Firefox, Desktop Chrome, Desktop Safari, Desktop Opera, iOS, and Android.
Attention! IE9 will not destroy the world, kill babies, or take away your home or job.
Simply put, IE9 is the best browser Microsoft has ever released. Has it caught up to Chrome, Firefox and Safari? No. But that doesn’t matter. It’s still light years ahead of any other version of IE. All of us should be praying every day for IE users to upgrade to it as soon as possible.
Shortly after the initial launch of the beta of IE9, I began testing to see what kind of support it had for all the rich and exciting features CSS3 offers for Web layout and interaction. The earlier beta’s didn’t have much, but with each release it has gotten better. If you’re already using advanced CSS3 for Web development and never bothered supporting IE before, you’ll want to know what it supports and what it doesn’t. Here’s what it supports at present right from the horse’s mouth. In particular, it supports real CSS opacity, multiple background images, box shadows, border radius, background-clip, background-size, background-position, WOFF for Web fonts, RGBA and HSLA color, box sizing, as well as the full suite of CSS3 selectors. The above post also talks about support for CSS3 2d transforms, however, even with the -ms- vender prefix I am unable to get it to work with the present beta (7).
Update: Transforms are working in Platform Preview 6, which is different from the present public beta. Microsoft is taking a two track approach to releasing this: the public beta for general users to test and a platform preview where features are introduced but not necessary finalized.
So what didn’t make it into IE9? First up, the flexible box model. Once you’ve used the flexible box model for layout, it’s as painful as eating glass to go back to using floats and positioning for layout. No text shadow, which is a strange omission considering they have box shadow. No border images. No CSS transitions. The single-threaded nature of JavaScript makes it inefficient for complex animations. Offloading style animations to the browser’s CSS rendering engine frees up JavaScript and allows the browser to use threads and hardware acceleration for better optimization. In my opinion, CSS3 transitions are more important than CSS3 transforms. Since Firefox, Opera and Webkit all support CSS3 transitions to some degree, it’s a odd omission for IE9. No 2d or 3d transforms. As I mentioned before, transforms do not appear to be implemented in the current beta. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong on this.) The thing I love about CSS3 transitions and transforms is that they allow you to create user interactions that make a Web application feel like a native one, blurring the difference between desktop and Web. No CSS3 keyframe animation. If you thought CSS3 transitions were awesome, you be blown away by CSS keyframe animations.
When I look at IE9′s support for CSS3, it appears they decided to pick the low hanging fruit: border radius, drop shadow, multiple backgrounds, etc. But the flexible box model, gradients, transitions, transforms and keyframe animation are the things in CSS3 that really turn your head.
I have no experience working with Adobe Flash. I do have extensive experience working with Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. I love how it enables you to create rich, interactive user interfaces where you can customize every aspect of a control’s look and feel. Chrome, Firefox and Safari’s support for CSS3 enables a similar high level of possibilities for the creation of Web user interfaces. IE9 is attempting to achieve feature parity with the other browsers and is making good progress. But if you want to use the CSS3 features that IE9 doesn’t support, you’ll need to find workarounds.
Presently my main area of focus is the mobile Web on Android, Blackberry 6, iOS and WebOS. That’s a world ruled by Webkit. But I usually make efforts to ensure that my solutions can also work with modern desktop browsers: Chrome, Firefox and Safari. That involves a lot of vender prefixes: -moz, -webkit. And then you need to future proof it by supplying the same property without the vendor prefix. This technique allows browsers that understand the properties, like IE9, to also render them without any extra effort.
I’m going to take one example of an HTML/CSS3 implementation of iOS’s popup dialog box which I originally created for use on iOS devices and show how I got it to render equally in Chrome, Firefox, IE9, Opera and Safari. At the end of this post you’ll find links to try it out online or download it. One thing, I’m not using any image pieces, just CSS3 properties. Here’s the initial state of the page with the popup in Safari and Firefox:
Here’s the page with the popup in view in Safari and Firefox:
Here’s the same markup in IE9. Notice how it understands border radius, box shadow and RGBA background color, but cannot render the flexible box model layout nor the CSS3 gradients.
The CSS specification includes a lot or properties, many of which are often forgotten or overlooked. Many of these are shorthand properties, defining many properties in one go. The outside columns of the cheat sheet list all available CSS properties.
