Intent to unship: -moz-prefixed CSS gradient functions

[Xidorn Quan]

In bug 1337655 [1], I'm going to disable -moz-prefixed CSS gradient
functions by default.

We would still have -webkit-prefixed version of those functions which is
part of the Compat spec [2]. The assumption is that there wouldn't be
too many pages which depend on -moz-prefixed ones without also having
the -webkit-prefixed counterpart.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1337655
[2] https://compat.spec.whatwg.org/#css-image-type


- Xidorn

[dhol...@mozilla.com]

On Thursday, April 13, 2017 at 6:22:48 PM UTC-7, Xidorn Quan wrote:
> In bug 1337655 [1], I'm going to disable -moz-prefixed CSS gradient
> functions by default.

This didn't stick (back in 2017), because it broke some buttons on gmail (which was filed as https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1366526 ). But that was later fixed on Google's end, and we didn't get any other reports of breakage, so I've just re-landed this.

So, consider this a resurrected "intent to un-ship" -moz-prefixed CSS gradient functions. :)

For now, I've only disabled them for EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER (i.e. Firefox 65 nightly and first half of Firefox 65 beta period), to get some testing without affecting release builds. But if we don't have any serious webcompat fallout, we can relax that restriction and disable them in release as well.

The full-disabling is tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1176496.

I'll quote the rest of xidorn's original intent-to-unship, for extra context/background:

[Daniel Holbert]

The un-shipping didn't stick this time, either. After just a few days of
Nightly testing, we had three reports of significant breakage that were
caused by this un-shipping (on zimbra[1], blogger[2], and a demo page for a
webapp framework[1] which may have legacy instances deployed). So, I
backed out (re-enabling -moz prefixed gradient functions).

Given that we've attempted this un-shipping & it's bounced several times
over the years, I tend to think we can't un-ship this moz-prefixed syntax
after all. The web unfortunately seems to depend on being able to UA sniff
& send -moz prefixed gradient CSS to Firefox-flavored browsers (with no
fallback CSS).

~Daniel

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1183994
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1512577
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1512224

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