/explore: trans-coding into older JS?

[pdille]

I see we make heavy use of ES6+ features.

We lose IE 11 here, but perhaps its time has come. And Edge legacy (before MS went to Chromium) is also going away. So for desktop I'm less worried these days, but if we want wide mobile support we HAVE to convert to pre-ES6. This is particularly true for Android < 8.

[dognotdog]

According to https://caniuse.com/?search=es6 ES6 works for 95% of people. Not knowing how this works on Android, do those Android users who have older systems have options to install other browsers, even if the default one does not support ES6?

Also, it seems like ES6 and WebGL are unsupported by the same Android versions? To be honest I don't quite understand the versioning schemes, after 4.4.4 comes 81, which Android OS are these related to?

[pdille]

Well, so those percentages I believe assumes everyone is using the latest available versions of things. That is of course not how the real world is. So when a new feature comes out and no browser has support, it begins at 0% until browsers add support, but the old versions (that don't have the support) still limp on.

Anyway, Android OS history (and browser history) is quite "fun". I wont' necessarily go into all the details here, but basically Android used to come with "Browser" and then eventually switched to Chrome. So Kitkat (4.4.4) was the last to offer "Browser". Chrome is no longer being updated on kitkat but it is available up to V81. Now just because you ran Chrome on kitkat (or future OS versions) did not mean that you were hunky dory. There was also something called "Android webview" that needed to be updated as time went on. That includes web rendering fixes/support (e.g. ES# stuff). The madness subsides some once we reach Android 10, but let me just say there are some gloriously subtle bugs in all these Android versions related to web stuff that I've come across over the years. Issues with video tags, specific JS functionality being oddly broken/unsupported, etc. And it's not documented by the vendors of course.

So yeah, I'm just suggesting we keep this on our radar.