CSS3

Released on the 2nd February, the CSS3 Test, created by web standards aficionado Lea Verou, offers a quick and easy way to test and compare browser support for CSS3.

In a blog post accompanying the release of the test, Lea Verou outlines her motivation for building the test as follows:

To motivate browsers to support the less hyped stuff, because I’m tired of seeing the same things being evangelized over and over. There’s much more to CSS3.

Keep reading to see how current release versions of the most popular web browsers shape up.

Released on Friday 20th May 2011, Firefox 5 beta brings long awaited support for the CSS3 Animations module, released as a W3C working draft in March 2009, to Mozilla’s popular web browser.

With Internet Explorer 9 barely out of the labs, Microsoft yesterday caught many developers by surprise, with the launch of the first platform preview of the latest incarnation of their popular web browser, Internet Explorer 10, at this years Mix conference.

The latest version of Internet Explorer, currently only three weeks into the development cycle, already boasts an impressive array of improvements, particularly in terms of CSS3 support, addressing many of the areas missed by IE9. For this release, Microsoft has paid particular attention to the CSS3 layout modules, with the platform preview offering implementations of the CSS3 Multi-column Layout module, the Flexible Box Layout module, and the recently announced CSS3 Grid Layout module.

Opera have once again kicked their level of CSS3 support up a notch with the release of the latest beta version of their popular web browser. Opera version 11.10 beta, code named ‘Barracuda’, was first unveiled at this weeks SXSW in Austin, Texas, before being made available for download as a public beta yesterday.

The most notable improvements to the browser, in terms of CSS3, are support for CSS3 multi-column layout and partial support for CSS3 gradients.

The latest Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview (build 6) released yesterday at Microsoft’s professional developers conferences adds further support for CSS3, specifically CSS3 2D Transforms.

Mozilla announced the arrival of Firefox 4 Beta 2 late last week, only three weeks after the release of Beta 1. This updated release includes two major improvements over the first beta release, notably increased performance and increased support for CSS3 Transitions.

You can download the latest release here.

The first public beta of the forthcoming Firefox 4 browser has been released bringing increased support for CSS3 amongst various other improvements.

One of the most notable new additions in Firefox 4 is support for CSS3 Transitions (with the -moz- prefix). Webkit based browsers (such as Safari / Chrome) and Opera have supported CSS3 Transitions for some time, almost three years in Webkit’s case, and it is reassuring to see that Mozilla have finally made an effort to catch up with the competition in this area.

Microsoft today announced further details of their forthcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser, along with the first platform preview for developers, at their MIX Conference 2010.

Amongst the announcements comes increased support for CSS3, with support promised for CSS3 Selectors, Namespaces, Colors, Values, Backgrounds & Borders and Fonts, along with increased support for HTML5 and improvements in JavaScript performance.

The platform preview, downloadable from the Internet Explorer website, comes with a number of demonstrations including those for CSS3 border-radius and selectors. The preview also scores an impressive 578/578 on our CSS3 Selectors Test and an improved 55/100 on the Acid 3 test, with further improvements promised before the final release.

You can read more on the Internet Explorer blog, or download the platform preview here.

Research in Motion, manufacturers of the popular BlackBerry smart phone series, have announced plans to launch a new web browser for their phones based on the open source WebKit layout engine, and offered delegates at this weeks Mobile World Congress a sneak peak (see the video at the end of this post).

Keith Clark, an independent web developer from the UK, has developed a JavaScript solution to IE’s CSS3 shortcomings in relation to CSS3 selectors. CSS3 selectors became the first W3C module to reach proposed recommendation status back in December 2009.

His ie-css3.js project (currently in beta) allows Internet Explorer, versions 5 through 8, to identify CSS3 pseudo-class selectors and render any style rules defined with them. All this is achieved by simply including the script, along with Robert Nyman’s DomAssistant, within the head element of your web pages.