Firefox users may have noticed that as of Mozilla’s release of version 23 today, they will no longer be supporting the blink tag. Your first feeling may be disbelief. Shock, even. Followed by disappointment. Bargaining. And then finally, acceptance.

An article on the MDN points out that all of the major browsers, except for Opera, have already dropped support for the blink tag. It looks like Opera will be the last one to hang on to that timeless feature. According to the MDN article, the blink tag was started by Netscape, which eventually became Mozilla. PC World has a more in depth article about the blink tag’s history, suggesting that the text effect was first implemented as something of a joke. And a hilarious one at that. Now, everyone hates it. W3C sticklers can rejoice in having a better reason to underline its entry on the “Don’t” list, since soon, no browser will recognize it.

But it’s no tremendous loss. If you’d really like text to blink, you can do something with CSS animations, like this fading effect that simply alternates between opacity values at the 0% and 100% keyframe points. This neat site tracks which CSS properties can be animated. At the moment, the display property cannot be. Although it suggests that the visibility property can be animated, Firefox isn’t buying it. You can always use JavaScript, of course, to make text do whatever you’d like. So don’t see this as a setback. See this as an opportunity to take advantage of HTML 5 and CSS 3.