Here’s what’s new in mobile Web compatibility this week.

CSS unprefixing

As Paul Rouget reported, this week the Firefox team unprefixed CSS3 animations, transitions, transforms and gradients. We also unprefixed the calc() function and IndexedDB. These changes are currently on the Nightly channel and targeted to be released in Firefox 16.

Web framework/library investigation

Our investigation will shortly start moving down a level in the stack from Web sites to Web frameworks and libraries. These can be either client or server side. What we are looking to identify is any framework or library that includes user agent sniffing or Webkit specific CSS generation or functionality.

We have a list of the top JavaScript Frameworks in use. The Mozilla Webdev team is working on a list of frameworks and libraries for other Web languages such as PHP, Ruby, and Java. Are you a Web dev? If so, please comment with the Web frameworks and libraries that you know to be most popular and of which you most make use so that we can get a good set for our investigation.

Webkit aliasing analysis

One possible mitigation for the proliferation of Webkit prefixed CSS properties is to support some of these properties in Firefox. Technically this can be achieved by providing Webkit prefix aliases for CSS properties that Firefox already supports. In fact, Opera has already adopted this tactic. At Mozilla, we have not yet made a decision about aliasing in Firefox.

As our current research has shown, the problems with the mobile Web extend beyond CSS prefixing to user agent sniffing and Webkit specific functionality. It is unclear that aliasing Webkit CSS prefixes in Firefox will provide much benefit to mobile Web compatibility. The Firefox Layout and QA teams kicked off an analysis this week to better understand the effect of aliasing. The results of this analysis will contribute to the discussion of whether we should consider aliasing any Webkit CSS properties in Firefox.

Site testing and outreach

Our compatibility report that tracks issues with mobile Web sites on Gecko has been published at arewecompatibleyet.com. The data in this report is driven off of data stored in Bugzilla. Please comment on this post if you have suggestions for making the report more useful.

Wikipedia includes video content in some of their pages. Playing the video content was previously thought to be fixed but unfortunately I discovered that although the play button is displayed, clicking play does not in fact play the video in any browser. Progress on this issue is tracked in Wikipedia bug 38305. As noted in the bug, as Wikipedia serves Ogg Vorbis content, Firefox on Android may be the only mobile browser capable of playing Wikipedia videos.

A scrolling issue was identified and reported to SeekingAlpha (bug 771949). Aaron reports that they have an engineer investigating the issue.

Aaron also verified the fix for PhotoSwipe.js that was reported last week. Thanks to PhotoSwipe for the fix!

Final call for review for UA sniffing and CSS property usage tool

The A-Team has put together a proposal to automate user agent sniffing and Webkit prefixed CSS property usage detection in the mobile Web. This is your final call for review. Feedback is requested by EOD Wed. July 18, 2012.