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CSS CSS Flexbox Layout Building a Layout with Flexbox Building a Navigation Bar with Flexbox

Dan Addison
Dan Addison
10,019 Points
Posted by Dan Addison
Dan Addison
10,019 Points

Should we just always use flex box and not worry about those people in the land that time forgot (outdated browsers)?

Hey folks, this flex box thing seems great so far, and unless I'm missing some big pitfalls further along the track it would seem that it's way easier and more powerful than grappling with tricky floats etc. So do you reckon it's just the obvious thing to utilise in all responsive web sites these days, regardless of that group of people who are still using old IE browsers that don't support flex box? Or, I'm thinking maybe if you were designing a site marketed at a particular demographic of people likely to use old browsers, then you would want to keep flex box out of it? Or, should you put a load of code in which works as a kind of fallback solution if the browser isn't flex box friendly? Though that might be creating way more work overall, for relatively rare scenarios? Any thoughts?

3 Answers

Miron Mitrea
PLUS
Miron Mitrea
Courses Plus Student 5,167 Points
Miron Mitrea
Miron Mitrea
Courses Plus Student 5,167 Points

IE still doesn't fully support flexbox, and there are a few people who still use it, so i don't think we are there yet. But it's easy to learn and maybe they will fix bugs in the near future. I still think it is a good investment to learn it.

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,275 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,275 Points

Doing things two ways seems a bit silly if both methods yield similar visual results.

Since flexbox has very good support at this time, I would think the only reason to avoid it would be if you have certain knowledge that your target audience is using incompatible browsers.

Dan Addison
Dan Addison
10,019 Points
Dan Addison
Dan Addison
10,019 Points

Thanks, yeah that was my guess, I wasn't sure whether flex box has now just been adopted by everyone or not because I remember overhearing a developer say he couldn't get away with using it in his job because of the incompatible browser issue (this was about a month ago when I still had no idea what flex box is!)

Daniel Kip
Daniel Kip
5,922 Points
Daniel Kip
Daniel Kip
5,922 Points

I got stuck with that in my mind too. My conclusion was that flexbox makes our life so much easier. Few lines, consistent results... Just like any other change in this field, people will have to adapt eventually. That's my bet right now.