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CSS CSS Flexbox Layout Flexbox Properties Distributing Space Inside a Flex Container

How common is it for front-end developers to use flexbox now a days in 2016?

I have read somewhere that flex-box is not supported or at least not all browsers read flex-box the same way, so things might change in the future. So how common is it for developers to use flex-box in today's real world projects? Should we as new developers use flex-box? It definitely seems easier to work with versus floats etc.,

3 Answers

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points

Depends on who your audience is. I personally, am starting to use flexbox in production.

If you look at this: http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox

It has a 94% support rate. That's good enough for me. Who's left behind, IE8 and IE9, and IE11 has only partial support.

Now, if your web app is really designed to be used by large fortune 500 companies, you may need to reconsider using flexbox. Large enterprise companies are slow to update. Usually the employees can't update much. So if they still have computers running Windows XP (and there probably will be) they'll be stuck in IE8.

Fortunately, Windows 10 dropped IE for Edge, which actually supports flexbox (bravo microsoft, bravo).

If you really want to do it right, use a graceful fallback. If the browser doesn't support flexbox, fall back to older layout standards. It doesn't have to look the same, it just shouldn't look broken.

But in my opinion, flexbox has the green light for production.

jason chan
jason chan
31,009 Points

You can disable it or enable it on bootstrap 4.

Eric Jusic
Eric Jusic
4,350 Points

It's even better, 97.5% global support, see here http://caniuse.com/#search=flex

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points

Flexbox is now a go for me. I use flexbox in production 100% of the time now, and if you look at the source CSS for many of your favorite sites, you'll probably see they've adopted flexbox into production as well.