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Autoprefixer

Parse CSS and add vendor prefixes to rules by Can I Use

Install / Use

/learn @postcss/Autoprefixer
About this skill

Quality Score

0/100

Supported Platforms

Universal

README

Autoprefixer Cult Of Martians

<img align="right" width="94" height="71" src="https://postcss.github.io/autoprefixer/logo.svg" title="Autoprefixer logo by Anton Lovchikov">

PostCSS plugin to parse CSS and add vendor prefixes to CSS rules using values from Can I Use. It is recommended by Google and used in Twitter and Alibaba.

Write your CSS rules without vendor prefixes (in fact, forget about them entirely):

::placeholder {
  color: gray;
}

.image {
  width: stretch;
}

Autoprefixer will use the data based on current browser popularity and property support to apply prefixes for you. You can try the interactive demo of Autoprefixer.

::-moz-placeholder {
  color: gray;
}
::placeholder {
  color: gray;
}

.image {
  width: -webkit-fill-available;
  width: -moz-available;
  width: stretch;
}

Twitter account for news and releases: @autoprefixer.

<a href="https://evilmartians.com/?utm_source=autoprefixer"> <img src="https://evilmartians.com/badges/sponsored-by-evil-martians.svg" alt="Sponsored by Evil Martians" width="236" height="54"> </a>

Contents

Browsers

Autoprefixer uses Browserslist, so you can specify the browsers you want to target in your project with queries like > 5% (see Best Practices).

The best way to provide browsers is a .browserslistrc file in your project root, or by adding a browserslist key to your package.json.

We recommend the use of these options over passing options to Autoprefixer so that the config can be shared with other tools such as babel-preset-env and Stylelint.

See Browserslist docs for queries, browser names, config format, and defaults.

FAQ

Does Autoprefixer polyfill Grid Layout for IE?

Autoprefixer can be used to translate modern CSS Grid syntax into IE 10 and IE 11 syntax, but this polyfill will not work in 100% of cases. This is why it is disabled by default.

First, you need to enable Grid prefixes by using either the grid: "autoplace" option or the /* autoprefixer grid: autoplace */ control comment. Also you can use environment variable to enable Grid: AUTOPREFIXER_GRID=autoplace npm build.

Second, you need to test every fix with Grid in IE. It is not an enable and forget feature, but it is still very useful. Financial Times and Yandex use it in production.

Third, there is only very limited auto placement support. Read the Grid Autoplacement support in IE section for more details.

Fourth, if you are not using the autoplacement feature, the best way to use Autoprefixer is by using grid-template or grid-template-areas.

.page {
  display: grid;
  grid-gap: 33px;
  grid-template:
    "head head  head" 1fr
    "nav  main  main" minmax(100px, 1fr)
    "nav  foot  foot" 2fr /
    1fr   100px 1fr;
}
.page__head {
  grid-area: head;
}
.page__nav {
  grid-area: nav;
}
.page__main {
  grid-area: main;
}
.page__footer {
  grid-area: foot;
}

See also:

Does it add polyfills?

No. Autoprefixer only adds prefixes.

Most new CSS features will require client side JavaScript to handle a new behavior correctly.

Depending on what you consider to be a “polyfill”, you can take a look at some other tools and libraries. If you are just looking for syntax sugar, you might take a look at:

  • postcss-preset-env is a plugins preset with polyfills and Autoprefixer to write future CSS today.
  • Oldie, a PostCSS plugin that handles some IE hacks (opacity, rgba, etc).
  • postcss-flexbugs-fixes, a PostCSS plugin to fix flexbox issues.

Why doesn’t Autoprefixer add prefixes to border-radius?

Developers are often surprised by how few prefixes are required today. If Autoprefixer doesn’t add prefixes to your CSS, check if they’re still required on Can I Use.

Why does Autoprefixer use unprefixed properties in @-webkit-keyframes?

Browser teams can remove some prefixes before others, so we try to use all combinations of prefixed/unprefixed values.

How to work with legacy -webkit- only code?

Autoprefixer needs unprefixed property to add prefixes. So if you only wrote -webkit-gradient without W3C’s gradient, Autoprefixer will not add other prefixes.

But PostCSS has plugins to convert CSS to unprefixed state. Use postcss-unprefix before Autoprefixer.

Does Autoprefixer add -epub- prefix?

No, Autoprefixer works only with browsers prefixes from Can I Use. But you can use postcss-epub for prefixing ePub3 properties.

Why doesn’t Autoprefixer transform generic font-family system-ui?

system-ui is technically not a prefix and the transformation is not future-proof. You can use postcss-font-family-system-ui to transform system-ui to a practical font-family list.

Usage

Gulp

In Gulp you can use gulp-postcss with autoprefixer npm package.

gulp.task('autoprefixer', () => {
  const autoprefixer = require('autoprefixer')
  const sourcemaps = require('gulp-sourcemaps')
  const postcss = require('gulp-postcss')

  return gulp.src('./src/*.css')
    .pipe(sourcemaps.init())
    .pipe(postcss([ autoprefixer() ]))
    .pipe(sourcemaps.write('.'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('./dest'))
})

With gulp-postcss you also can combine Autoprefixer with other PostCSS plugins.

Webpack

In [webpack] you can use [postcss-loader] with autoprefixer and other PostCSS plugins.

module.exports = {
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.css$/,
        use: ["style-loader", "css-loader", "postcss-loader"]
      }
    ]
  }
}

And create a postcss.config.js with:

module.exports 

Related Skills

View on GitHub
GitHub Stars22.6k
CategoryDevelopment
Updated1d ago
Forks1.3k

Languages

JavaScript

Security Score

100/100

Audited on Mar 22, 2026

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