@philipwalton Fascinating, thank you for this! Is it...

Yoz

@philipwalton Fascinating, thank you for this!

Is it possible that some sites served ES6+ code because they recognised Chrome (which HTTP Archive uses for the crawl) BUT would serve purely ES5 code to (say) IE11?

I've no idea how common this would be in practice, but I remember plenty of recommendations in the past about doing this sort of thing.

Like 9 September at 17:33 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.social

3 comments

Philip Walton

@yoz it's possible, but...

1) When I tested the 20 sites in IE 11, all of the ones I tested had numerous script parse errors for the same URLs that I saw in my query results.

2) Even if a site were doing this, the fact that they were serving ES5 helper code to Chrome UAs is still not optimal.

9 September at 17:37 | Open on toot.cafe

Yoz

@philipwalton Thank you, #1 is what I was looking for. You mention this in a paragraph in the blog post, but the phrasing leaves it slightly ambiguous about whether what you did in IE11 was browse the sites *or* load the Chrome-served code bundles. (Sorry if that sounds kind of nonsensical.)

9 September at 17:44 | Open on mastodon.social

Philip Walton

@yoz yeah, I loaded them in IE 11 via BrowserStack.

And looking at the phrasing, I agree it's not 100% clear, so I'll update it. Thanks for the feedback!

9 September at 17:47 | Open on toot.cafe

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