On October 17th, Microsoft’s Edge browser shipped its implementation of CSS Grid. This is a milestone for a number of reasons. First, it means that all major browsers now support this incredible layout tool. Second, it means that all major browsers rolled out their implementations in a single year(!), a terrific example of standards success and cross-browser collaboration. But third, and perhaps most interestingly, it closes the loop on a process that has been more than 20 years in the making.
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“I don’t recall a feature ever shipping like CSS Grid has shipped. Every major browser will have shipped it within a matter of a single year, and it will be interoperable because we’ve been… implementing [it] behind flags, testing it, making future changes behind flags, and then when it was deemed stable, all the browsers are now shipping it natively.”
“With everybody shipping at approximately the same time,” Atkins said, “[Grid] goes from an interesting idea you can play with to something that you just use as your only layout method without having to worry about fallbacks incredibly quickly. … [It’s been] faster than I expected any of this to work out.”
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“It is the most powerful layout tool that we have invented yet for CSS,” [Tab] Atkins said. “It makes page layouts so ridiculously easy. … [P]eople have always been asking for better layouts. Just for author-ability reasons and because the hacks that we were employing weren’t as powerful as the old methods of just put[ting] it all in a big old table element—that was popular for a reason; it let you do powerful complex layouts. It was just the worst thing to maintain and the worst thing for semantics. And Grid gives you back that power and a lot more, which is kind of amazing.”