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When can I use…

Preview of the 'When can I use' page

A few weeks ago I was trying to find out which browser supported exactly which experimental feature, be it CSS3, HTML5, or something else. I found a couple of useful pages, but nothing quite as detailed as what I was looking for. Since I enjoy graphs, charts, and showing the world how much IE6 really sucks, I went ahead and made what I was looking for.

Thus was born the “When can I use…” page, which shows tables of a variety of current and upcoming web technologies. For all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome), versions for four different eras (past, present, near and far future).

The page can be customized to show only certain browsers/features/eras, so you have the option to ignore lesser used browsers or for that matter the most used one (it’s a lot of fun to pretend Internet Explorer doesn’t exist). I’ve also included a summary at the bottom of the page, which shows what percentage of the displayed features are supported.

Most features were tested myself, to ensure that the information is accurate. Please let me know if you notice any mistakes. Keep in mind that a “supported” feature may not actually work 100%, as well as the fact that some of the specifications are not set in stone yet, so what may be supported today may not actually work in the future. However, it is likely that in most cases the browser will update its support as the spec changes.

The feature list includes anything I personally feel is of significant use to web designers, but still lacks support in at least one browser version. I am open to adding more features, but only if it’s of significant importance and not just a detailed subset of another feature.

I intend to update the page as new browsers are released, or at the very least once a year. Due to its popularity, the page is updated as soon as new information becomes available.

192 replies on “When can I use…”

Really useful and well-rounded table. It could become even better if you added the Blackberry browsers.

Hi,
awesome site!

One thing is kinda strange:
When I use the search field and after that try to follow a link form the index site it still shows the results of my initial search.
Thats quite counter intuitive imho.

It would be nice if you could add mor SVG-related Stuff to your charts.

At the moment i’m trying to build a website with SVG images referenced by the HTML “img” tag, which are styled by an external stylesheet referenced in the SVG’s.

That way i’ve found out, that most of the browsers do that well, except for WebKit browsers, which allow only for one level of referencing documents. Thus, the first reference being the image itself in HTML, further referencing inside the SVG is blocked for some reason! So you cannot link externals stylesheets for SVG images embedded inside HTML in Safari or Chrome, or similar WebKit browsers! Works fine in Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer (9+) …

Please add at least external stylesheet referencing in SVGs inside Webpages to your charts, that would surely not only be helpful for me.

I think most of the people are not really aware of this fantastic possibility and the power it gives your websites or applications, if that function would work properly!

Hello,

i want to make a web application which will use much css3 and html5.
in order to show the users the compatibility with the browsers it would be very cool if you could provide some kind of API.

i would submit the features uses in my app and you could build such a nice and up to date compatibility table – with a “proudly presented by http://www.caniusehits.com” on the bottom.

What do you think?

You should add Safari 5.1 as “near future” for comparison – beta version is available in yet-to-be-finished Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

@anyone with feature suggestions:

Thanks! No promises on which features I will add, but your requests are definitely noted.

@those with corrections and link ideas:

Thanks! Will update the information appropriately.

@those who’d like to see more browsers/agents:

For now I’m only able to add devices I can test myself (usually using an emulator) and they must have significant enough market share. I’d like to add BlackBerry next but have had trouble getting the emulator to work…

@Adam – re: | in URLs, let me see what I can do.

@Joel Martin – Thanks, will add!

@Gérard Talbot –

1, 3. Sounds like a good idea, I will consider this for the future. At the moment it’s not easy to make such a change though. Also note that the purpose of the site is to provide up to date rough ideas of whether or not a feature is supported for a very broad amount of features. Complete support analysis is not within its scope.

2. Sorry, not enough user share. Statcounter gives the amount of global users as being less that 0.01%.

4. You’re right about Chrome 10, has now been updated, thanks! Safari 5 however does not in my test.

5. You’re absolutely right. But it appears evident that a “yes/almost/no” answer still has much value to designers/developers even if it can be inaccurate in different situations. For now, that’s the best I can do in order to cover as many features as I do.

The support for CSS as a background image has an important qualifier that isn’t represented on your test page.

Animated SVG seems to only be correctly supported in Firefox 4 right now.

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