As a web developer, learning the internals of browser operations helps you make better decisions and know the justifications behind development best practices. While this is a rather lengthy document, we recommend you spend some time digging in; we guarantee you'll be glad you did.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about feature detection and browser detection. That post featured a little bit about user-agent sniffing and the comments continued the trend. I maintain that user-agent sniffing is an important technique to keep in your back pocket for those rare occasions when it’s needed. Before being able to do that, though, it’s useful to understand why user-agent string detection is considered to be such an inexact science. And to do that, you need to take a look at how the user-agent string has evolved over the years.

There has been a lot of mentions of the use of GPU (graphics processing unit) hardware acceleration in smartphone and tablet web browsers. So far, the content has been pretty general and hasn’t provided much technical direction apart from simple advice such as “use CSS translate3d”. This blog article tries to shed some more light on browser interactions with the GPU and explain what happens behind the scenes.

Nonetheless, I wanted to document every browser-specific css selector and style attribute hack I've seen. Plus there's no way to provide stylesheets to only Safari, I believe.