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by Groxx 4236 days ago
Hm. Alternatively, they could serve the same js to everyone, and (assuming sites use the CDN) it would be cached across pages, so users would only pay for it once. Zero fanciness needed on the CDN.

How big is the "full" set of polyfills anyway? Probably small enough that a single download isn't an issue on even dialup?

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That aside, polyfill ALL the things. Hopefully making it easier makes it common, which lets devs use a nicer version of Javascript.
2 comments
ben336 4236 days ago
> How big is the "full" set of polyfills anyway?

Google's polyfills for custom elements that they ship with Polymer weigh in at around ~151Kb of JavaScript, around 10x the size of a small library like Underscore, and 4-5x times the size of an MVC framework like Angular. And they only cover about 5-6 specs (the 4 webcomponent specs and a few more to support them) Those are admittedly hard to polyfill features that will be bigger than most, but it turns out that polyfilling "everything" is hard and would add significant page weight.

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ahoge 4236 days ago
> How big is the "full" set of polyfills anyway?

Right now it's around 75 kB without minification and without gzip. However, this doesn't include any code for doing feature detection.

So, my somewhat educated guess would be: around 30 kB (which is comparable to jQuery).

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Groxx 4235 days ago
A definitely-flawed sorta-concatenation of all `if(detect.js){polyfill.js}` files, plus some cleanup, plus syntax fixes, run through http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home gives me just under 10kb gzipped, just over 31kb raw.

Nice guess :) that seems not too bad, tbh.

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