Comparison of layout engines (Cascading Style Sheets)

The following tables compare CSS compatibility and support for a number of layout engines. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up-to-date. Unless otherwise specified in footnotes, comparisons are based on the stable versions without any add-ons, extensions or external programs.

[edit] Explanation of the tables

[edit] Engine nomenclature

Rather than the names of web browsers, the names of the underlying engines are used. The browsers that use the various engines are listed below.

[edit] Values

Values indicate the level of support in the most recent version of the layout engine, or (if a version number is given) in the specified version. Version numbers without any other value indicate the version at which the layout engine first fully supported the feature.

[edit] CSS version support

This article or section is incomplete and may require expansion and/or cleanup. Please improve the article, or discuss the issue on the talk page.

See the article Cascading Style Sheets for more information on the different versions of CSS. This table doesn't reference CSS2.0, as CSS2.1 was intended to replace it by correcting or removing a few errors and features rejected by the CSS community. Most of the removed CSS2 features will be made obsolete by CSS3.

[edit] Grammar and rules

[edit] Trident grammar and rule notes

1. !important — !important doesn't override rules defined later in the same declaration block prior to IE7.
2. @import — Media type support is broken in all versions including IE7. For @import exampleurl examplemedia; IE requests the url exampleurl%20examplemedia and will include url() and/or quotes in the url, too, if present in the @import rule.
3. @font-face — Only supports Embedded OpenType (.eot) font format, does not understand the format() identifier.

[edit] Tasman grammar and rule notes

1. @font-face — Versions 5.16 and 5.17 will download fonts specified but not use them. 5.23 no longer downloads the font.

[edit] Gecko grammar and rule notes

1. @font-face — Does not support @font-face on Linux: [2]

[edit] Presto grammar and rule notes

1. @import — Whilst Gecko, WebKit and iCab download all media stylesheets immediately, Opera only downloads handheld, print, projection and screen media, as well as speech if "voice" feature is enabled and tv, on tv devices. Text browser emulation mode is only a user stylesheet, so it does not switch to tty media type. This is consistent with older text browsers, which do not respect any CSS.

[edit] Selectors

[edit] Trident selector notes

1. :active — :active is for anchor element only.
2. :hover — :hover is applied for all elements only in standards-compliant mode, not quirks mode [3]. Prior to 7.0, :hover is for anchor element only.
3. .one.two — only .two class selector was taken into consideration before 7.0.
4. * — Prior to 7.0 this was treated as a single or no element.
5. :first-letter — float and vertical-align properties not allowed.
6. :first-line — can't be attached to a inline-block element and background property doesn't work when pseudo-element is attached to a layout element.

[edit] Tasman selector notes

1. :hover — For anchor element only prior to 0.9.
2. .one.two — only .two class selector is taken into consideration.

[edit] Gecko selector notes

1. :*-of-type — See Bug 128585 on Bugzilla.
2. :nth-* — See Bug 75375 on Bugzilla.
3. (:):before, (:):after — CSS2.0 behavior : some properties are unimplemented prior to 1.9.1. See Bug 237119 on Bugzilla.

[edit] WebKit selector notes

1. :lang() — Only detected when explicitly present on element being tested, attribute not inherited.
2. :first-line — text-transform doesn't apply with this pseudo-element. See Bug 3409 on Bugzilla.

[edit] Presto selector notes

1. :target — Style doesn't get applied when navigating using back and forward buttons.

[edit] Properties