Hey everyone, I recently received feedback from a user saying that my website isn't functioning correctly on their Chrome browser, while it works fine on Edge. After looking into it, I discovered they're using an older version of Chrome (122). I tested this version myself and found that my website has issues with certain WebAssembly (WASM) modules. Interestingly, everything worked perfectly on version 123. Now I know the exact version cutoff where the site breaks, but beyond that, I don't have much to go on. There's no error messages in the console or any crashes. It feels like my site is experiencing some ghost issue. I thought about checking the changelog, but it was overwhelming. Given that I rely on several packages, which might depend on newer browser features, should I work on a fix, or would it be better to just block users on older versions? I've been trying to isolate the problem and added some console logs, but to no avail. Is there a way to scan my project for compatibility issues?
2 Answers
You can access the DOM to check which features your browser supports and run your WASM only in the compatible versions. Unfortunately, there's no polyfill for the newer WASM functionalities, meaning if the older browsers can’t handle it, they simply won’t work. This is actually a bit of a blessing, as it lets you know that those users might just need to update their browsers. If you're looking to support older versions, that's a much bigger task.
For future projects, it could be helpful to state that you support the latest two versions of a browser and operating system. It seems like your client is using an outdated version of macOS, which was the last to receive updates around version 122. Just a thought for planning ahead!
That seems like the smart move. The client is on Windows 10, so no issues from Mac users, but I'll keep that in mind for future projects.
Yeah, I'm not planning to polyfill either. It's a strange WASM issue that's tough to nail down. If I could just figure out the precise cause, I could find more context about it. But I guess I'll just implement a block for browsers below that version.