GitHub: How we think about browsers

GitHub is currently shipping ES2019-compatible code, and will soon ship ES2020 code.

GitHub will soon be serving JavaScript using syntax features found in the ECMAScript 2020 standard, which includes the optional chaining and nullish coalescing operators. This change will lead to a 10kb reduction in JavaScript across the site.

Wow, won’t that exclude a whole bunch of browsers? No. Looking at the data, the majority of their visitors use the latest version of a browser, or the version before that (wow!).

This shows us that the promise of evergreen browsers is here today. The days of targeting one specific version of one browser are long gone. […] With that said, we still need to ensure some compatibility for user agents, which do not fall into the neat box of evergreen browsers. Universal access is important, and 1% of 73 million users is still 730,000 users.

To cater for older browsers they include some polyfills to plug the holes, but that’s not really needed:/p>

With JavaScript disabled, you’re still able to log in, comment on issues and pull requests, browse source code, search for repositories, and even star, watch, or fork them. Popover menus even work.

Yes, a thousand times YES!

GitHub: How we think about browsers →

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

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