Be Excited for New Features

“Boy, that’s a cool new browser feature. It’s a shame I won’t be able to use it for ten years.”

I’ve been seeing a sentiment a lot lately, a sort of despair that some new browser feature won’t be reasonably available for production use for years. And I get it; it was this way for a long time. We web developers still have a lingering bit of emotional trauma from the early days of flexbox, web fonts, and the first CSS3 features.

The old adage comes to mind: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool my twice, shame on me. And boy, have we been fooled a few times in the past.

However, it’s not 2013 anymore. This resignation regarding new browser features—especially in the realm of CSS—is outdated. These days, most brand spanking new features are ready for production use within months, not years.

Be an optimist ¶

The last couple years have been wild for CSS. Dozens of highly anticipated new features have begun rolling out. Let’s look at some examples.

Cascade layers first shipped in Firefox on February 8, 2022. This was followed almost immediately by Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The last major browser to ship support was Opera, on April 19, only two months after Firefox.

OKLCH color first arrived in Chrome on March 6, 2023. Firefox was the last major browser to ship support, two months later on May 8. Some of the more obscure mobile browsers like Samsung Internet were only another couple months after that.

The color-mix() function arrived in Safari on December 12, 2022. The Blink browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera) shipped in March. Firefox was the last to add support on May 8, 2023. That’s full browser support within a five month window.

This is the norm now. Yes, there are exceptions, so it’s important to keep an eye on things, but we don’t need to resign ourselves to defeat as a default anymore.

Caveats and exceptions ¶

It’s important to be aware that there’s generally a bit of a delay after release before all users upgrade their browsers. This can generally take anywhere from three to nine months to hit critical mass—depending in large part what you consider “critical mass” to be given your user base and the ease of defining fallback behavior for the specific feature in question. Perhaps you target a part of the market that happens to be particularly slow at upgrades; I totally acknowledge that is an unfortunate reality for some of us.

So, depending on a few factors like these, you might be able to use a new features anywhere from the moment it ships to a year or (in absolutely horrible circumstances) two years after that.

Some features are more complex, admittedly. Chrome has eagerly shipped @scope, while Firefox has yet to formally take a stance on the specification. (Safari has indicated support.)

But again, this is the exception, not the rule. So learn those exciting new features, keeping an eye on the overall landscape, and get ready to use them confidently.