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It means it's an experimental API introduced by Google. It may be deprecated (although standardized APIs can be deprecated as well). If it can exist as a polyfill, that means you can use it in your app and polyfill it if needed, as well as continue to polyfill it in the event of deprecation. Your assessment of whether it's appropriate should be based on what the benefits are. In the example of the WebSocketStream API, I suppose you compare it to the ergonomics of existing libraries doing the same thing, or the difficulty of implementing such a thing yourself. You might also consider the performance of the experimental API on Chrome, as well as the polyfill on other browsers, and if the worst-case performance is not too bad, or even better than the best-case performance of the competing ways to do something similar, you use it! In many situations, you can expect to find this on the path to standardization, but this only means you eventually may be able to remove the polyfill. If you're developing for the web, I'd be very surprised if you, or at least your dependencies, haven't at any point used experimental APIs introduced in one or more browsers prior to standardization. In fact, if you use websockets much at all, it's very likely you've also used sub-protocols[1] developed by neither WHATWG, W3C or IETF (possibly abstracted from you by websocket server libraries, or else introduced by a websocket API you use) [1]: https://www.iana.org/assignments/websocket/websocket.xml#ext... |