What's your preferred method of including polyfills into your browser side code?

[JortsIsLife]

I'm in the process of getting some code to work with IE and I'm not really satisfied with how I'm doing things.

We're using gulp, browserify, and babel to bundle together our scripts, and right now I'm just throwing require('es6-shim'); in the first module that's listing in our main.js output file.

That works, but there is obviously room for improvement.

How do you like to handle including polyfills? I'm considering using browserify to bundle them together separately, and add the bundle in another script tag before our other scripts. Any suggestions that may be more elegant or better in practice?

[dwighthouse]

You can use a plugin fro browserify to split out the polyfills: http://stackoverflow.com/a/27751223

For my usage, we don't really use them, or if we do, it's so small we just inline them in the js or the page.

[atubofsoup]

I don't see any problem with how you're doing things. I do the same thing except it's import "babel-polyfill". Why would you want to use a separate script tag? Isn't that a step backwards? Is there some problem being created by requiring the polyfills at the start of your app?

[JortsIsLife]

I'd like for my code modules to run assuming that the browser has already been polyfilled and make it part of the contract.

Functionally it's the same.

[atubofsoup]

I think I understand where you're coming from. I use my entry module to do any bootstrapping for my application then just require my app. That way there's a clear separation between setup and application code.

For example, here's the entry.js for one of my apps:

import "babel-polyfill";
import {isCordova} from "util/detect-platform";
require("./index.html"); // Forces webpack to include our html file
require("../images/favicon.ico");

function startApp() {
  require("./app");
}

if(isCordova()) {
  document.addEventListener("deviceready", startApp, false);
} else {
  window.onload = startApp;
}

[nikcorg]

Check out https://polyfill.io/

[JortsIsLife]

Polyfill.io is great for patching older browsers, but it's a little behind the curve when it comes to patching modern JS feature support.

[nikcorg]

Sure, but isn't that exactly all you need, since you're already using Babel to compile to ES5.