Why should Mozilla ... safari make CSS more awkward with the -moz and -webkit tags?

Question

There may be an odd question, but it cannot find an explanation anywhere. I just don’t understand why the extra -moz and -webkit tags were necessary for the new CSS3 properties, if they could contain it just like the rest of the standard CSS properties. Isn't it easier to just use box-shadow for all browsers instead of using -moz-box-shadow and -webkit-box-shadow ... Can anyone explain why this is so? Something is missing for me.

Answer 1

Vendor prefixes exist for properties that are proprietary or experimental.

Most CSS 3 specifications are not yet candidate recommendations; they are still under development and are subject to change.

Many of the properties covered by the specifications, which are candidate recommendations or more advanced, are still being polished by browser vendors who do not consider their own implementations ready.

Prefixes are discarded if properties are considered ready for use in native mode. You will see a concrete example of this when Firefox 4 is released, when it starts supporting the standard shadow window declaration, instead of requiring -moz-box-shadow.

Answer 2

"Supplier extensions" are part of the W3C recommendation and allow developers to use new properties that are not yet complete and will not be flagged as errors using the validator (in the end). For example, webkit and gecko treat some of the new CSS3 properties differently because the specification was not finalized until it was used in these browsers.