Browser bugs, feature detection and you: tips for making forward-looking frontends

One of the wonderful parts about the web, is that it is constantly evolving. This evolution solves common pain points, leads to less code sent to clients, and supports more performant and ambitious applications.

However, this evolution brings pressure on web developers to track changes, and adapt our code to new practices. Browsers adopt features at different rates, so code paths often have to fork based on capabilities.

In this talk, we will step through common ways of keeping a code base healthy in this changing environment, such as feature detection, automatic code transpilation and manual User Agent sniffing.

We will also look at a way of handling an often-overlooked inverse case; knowing when to stop forking the code paths once a feature is available everywhere, in a sustainable and informed way.