ECMAScript 6 compatibility table VS user.js

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

This page lists features from es6 (and newer versions linked at the top) along with compliance to the spec. First column is the current browser, second is babel+corejs polyfills.

Overall, babel gets about 70% of the way there.

Case in point: Tail Call Optimization has been part of the JS spec since ES6, but remains completely unimplemented in all mainstream browsers/engines besides Safari[1]. For all but the most predictable inputs, you're pretty much forced to use loops where recursion would otherwise be preferable.

Additional case in point: async Iterables cannot be processed as a piped stream. You must use the for await construct, which is a shame considering the FP niceties that the Array type already provides for more traditional lists. Once again, you are forced to use an imperative construct unless you specifically want to defeat the purpose of using an Iterable in the first place by trying to convert it into an Array (... and potentially choking in the process, I might add!).

[1]: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Eventually the browsers started racing to near-full ES6 compatibility. I remember following ES6 progress in realtime with articles and with compatibility tables http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ . But many people are acting like that either didn't happen, or like it was a one and done thing (despite the ESNext naming shift to avoid the focus on numbers). So we see people just hand-waving away the importance of polyfills like in this gem:

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

Oh man this was a rough one both for FF and Chrome but Chrome did perform better slightly on cursory glance.

Thanks for providing these links, they're definitely a good rule of thumb benchmarks to test new browsers

Javascript / CSS language syntax: can see availability for Javascript here - https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

I say this as a JS user, but there is no singular JavaScript (realistically, it's not even JavaScript but instead ECMAScript). There is no one place to go that lays out all of what the language can or can't do the way PHP and Python do. The ECMAScript board makes recommendations, then the browsers and runtimes implement features of the recommendations. This site does a good job laying out which features are implemented for browsers and runtimes based on the flavor of the ECMAScript standard. This unique experience can be especially frustrating for someone learning JavaScript and coming from another language that does not have this problem.

https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ has a column for "current browser"

Re: firefox and privacy, if you want to use firefox for privacy, consider using https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js . There is a case to be made that Firefox (with arkenfox's user.js) is one of the best privacy-respecting but still fairly usable browsers.

For extensions, I recommend people follow the recommendations[1] in the arkenfox repo and either harden their firefox or use librewolf. Umatrix is unmaintained since 2019.

[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions

For macOS : Thunderbird and you can harden it even more with this : https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

only arkenfox

This article is shit. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/ is what you want.

If you make time to dig through settings and change them away from their official use (99% of users don't), then you should use a customized setup (in this case, a user.js). That way, you're good to go no matter what Firefox fork you use.

> Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime

Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/in...

[2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/

Like others have said you can customize the browser to the point that it doesn't even look like the default anymore. Or customize it to maximize privacy.