Published : Oct 28, 2020
NOT ON THE CURRENT EDITION
This blip is not on the current edition of the Radar. If it was on one of the last few editions, it is likely that it is still relevant. If the blip is older, it might no longer be relevant and our assessment might be different today. Unfortunately, we simply don't have the bandwidth to continuously review blips from previous editions of the Radar.
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Oct 2020
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Polyfills are extremely useful to help the web evolve, providing substitute implementations of modern features for browsers that don't implement them (yet). Too often, though, web applications ship polyfills to browsers that don't need them, which causes unnecessary download and parsing overhead. The situation is becoming more pronounced now as only a few rendering engines remain and the bulk of the polyfills target only one of them: the Trident renderer in IE11. Further, market share of IE11 is dwindling with support ending in less than a year. We therefore suggest that you make use of browser-tailored polyfills, shipping only necessary polyfills to a given browser. This technique can even be implemented as a service with Polyfill.io.
