The Web was certainly working before that functionality, which should be considered beta feature anyways, and you could've waited till it was standardised. If we'll support each and every lousy developer on the world, things will surely get more complex and dirty. And no user will ditch a browser for some css not working, they'll use the other browser temporarily for that website. Throughout this thread people consider users as lousy, nagging, complaining, brain dead people that jump from one browser to another, but this is not the case. They're as smart as each and every dev here, they just don't know programming. I guess what's going on is that devs and amateurs make lousy stuff and go singig the song of the infedele users because they don't want to fix their things.
Not exactly, as the functionality is experimental and subject to change. That was the whole point of the prefixes.
Syntax and behavior of css changed between proposals and early drafts of a new feature and the final result.
So without prefixes you'd have a single "XXX" CSS name that might get deprecated altogether (eg the name ends up XXY) or be defined to have different behavior (e.g. it remains XXX, but not it also makes the element bold rather than just italic).