Compatibility

How can we use the latest ECMAScript features and still be compatible with most browsers?

https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

ECMAScript 6 compatibility table

Transpilation

ECMAScript 5.1 is for modern ECMAScript what assembly is for C++.

We need a transpiler:

• Babel: https://babeljs.io/​

• TypeScript: https://www.typescriptlang.org/​

But this will not be enough as transpilers will only convert syntactic features but not new browser APIs and methods.

Polyfills

We need to compensate the lack of some objects, functions or methods customElements, fetch, Array.filter on some browsers.

In order to fill the gap, we will use polyfill libraries. These libraries detect missing features and compensate them with JavaScript implementations.

Example:

if (Array.prototype.first == null) {
    Array.prototype.first = function () {
        return this[0];
    };
}
​
const valueList = [1, 2, 3];
​
console.log(valueList.first()); // 1

One of the most famous polyfill libraries is core-js https://github.com/zloirock/core-js.

Or you can use a polyfill service like https://polyfill.io.