[ux-app]

As a technical demo they're great. In practice though, I wouldn't recommend using these techniques because:

  - Many are completely broken in FF
  - Crashed my FF (19.0.2) and strangely sent my GPU fan into overdrive
  - These techniques hurt performance badly. In the case of gradients 
    the browser has to first generate the bitmaps 
    from the gradient definitions, apply any clipping/masks 
    and then composite any other overlaying elements. 
    This is far more taxing than simply grabbing a 
    bitmap and painting into a region.

[dan15]

Agree, they're great for mockups though as it's really easy to change the colours rapidly. Also good for doing things like animation of gradients.