Those "Safari specific" css properties are part of CSS 3. The reason for the -webkit- prefix is that CSS 3 has not yet been finalised, and this needs to be made clear to developers. Firefox also supports these "Safari specific" with the -moz- prefix. For more info check http://css3.info which details what browsers have implemented what portions of CSS3, and what their prefixes are. You should possibly have at least googled these properties before deciding Safari was another IE. the -enginename- prefix on properties is the *correct* way to indicate unfinalised properties. Googling "border-image", "border-radius", etc would have taken you directly to the css3 spec. "-webkit-border-image", etc would take you directly to css3.info (as would "-moz-border-radius" -- firefox doesn't appear to support border-image yet :( ) If anything this shows that Safari has a commitment to standards...

Ooh, the -webkit-appearance ones are less good, but once again they have the standard engine specific prefix, which should tell designers that it is a browser specific extension. Still it differs from the IE approach where there's no distinction between standard and non-standard properties. As an added advantage the property will fallback to working content on other browsers. OTOH *all* browsers (including firefox) have a ream of non-standard features, especially in JS (JS being where all the pain happens as there are lots of useful things in all the browsers, even IE -- *shudder* -- but the standardisation process has failed to specify). A great example of a really useful feature in firefox is console.log -- unfortunately it is not specified in any standard, should they remove it because it isn't specified? no -- but remember that means attempting to use it will break a script in *all* other browsers. That great and marvellous canvas tag was originally introduced by Apple in Safari (2?) and is now going to be part of html5 and is already supported by Firefox and Opera. So occasionally non-standard features lead to good standardised features (eg. canvas) or at least should be (why doesn't safari have console.log? :( ). Nowadays CSS has the -engine- prefix to further help designers distinguish standardised features from non-standardised ones