http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid
It'd be so nice to be able to finally get CSS Grids so that masonry layouts can be native and not have to rely on unwieldy JS implementations that are slow, cumbersome, and buggy.
The polyfills aren't great, either. I'm using Isotope/Packery in the meantime, but I wish I didn't have to.
Anyone else been waiting on this for what seems like forever?
Alkshendra Maurya
Frontend Engineer | Hashnode Alumnus
(purely opinion based)
Because browser developers are different then language creators.
A language creator wants their developers to be happy and have the latest and greatest because only developers use languages and so the target demographic is pretty set.
A browser developer has 2 target demographics - the user, using the browser, and the developer, developing websites that need to work on multiple browsers. In this case, the user base is infinitely bigger then the developer base and users don't care about Flex grid or WebP images or etc... They care about pages rendering fast, or security, or plugins or sharing bookmarks across devices.
So while a php developer and say someone that only does front-end are pretty much equally important now a days, it's easier to give the php developer what he / she wants as theres only a few of them (relatively) compared to the incredibly more people just using the browser and not developing websites.
</priorities>
New specs like Grid Layout do take a lot of time in browser implementations but that’s not because the browser developer delay it, it is but mostly cause the spec keeps on changing(evolving).
The implementation and syntax keeps on changing as W3C irons out the spec, it is only when the spec is in near perfect stage that the browsers start implementing it.
As for the CSS Grid spec; it has came a long way since its proposal by Microsoft in 2010 and the current version of the spec is very different from what was proposed initially.
The actual implementation of the CSS grid spec started towards the end of 2014 and the latest working draft is from 19th May 2016. Considering the changes in the spec, I believe it is a pretty good progress by far.
Most browsers have got the grid enabled under a flag so a more stable implementation is just around the corner now! :)
Extra: You should check out this talk by Manuel Rego who is one of the guys implementing the grid spec in Blink and WebKit, he talks about the spec and some technicalities involved in the implementation.