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ChromeFill

Automatically injects polyfills for old Chromium into webpages

2023 Update

This extension should now be considered deprecated and is no longer being maintained. This is because, as of 2023, a large majority of sites are now using functionality that can no longer be polyfilled in old versions of Chromium (see nullish coalescing and optional chaining section, below), and there is no usable auto-transpiling support in this extension. At this point, the limits of using a 4-5 year old browser are becoming more and more insurmountable.

If you are still using this extension, you may want to use the revision prior to experimental auto-transpiling being added: https://github.com/InterLinked1/chromefill/tree/e2c1ee5c5b5e52505540bb0fd59800d97ffb92fc

(In practice, the auto-transpiling doesn't really work, but just makes some pages load forever and then crash, so you may as well just have it fail immediately.)

Additionally, keep in mind that many sites simply will no longer work properly and there is nothing that polyfilling can do about this.

This repository will remain available, but will likely no longer see active updates. If there is functionality addressed (or that could be addressed) by this extension that still can be addressed through polyfilling, you are welcome to open an issue.

Background

Many users of non-recent Chromium and Firefox browsers noticed in Q4 of 2021 that a lot of websites suddenly stopped working, partially (and in rare cases, completely), within a few weeks of each other. This was due to the adoption of newer JavaScript standards, many bleeding-edge or vendor-specific, and highly-compatible standards-based JavaScript was replaced with this newer code that caused sites to malfunction in older (in the case of Chromium) and other (in the case of non-Chromium and Firefox) browsers. This meant that sites which used to work perfectly fine in these browsers no longer did.

The problem is not that these browsers aren't capable of running these sites properly - they did, just fine, for a long time. Rather, highly compatible JavaScript code was replaced with less compatible JavaScript, which basically killed off support for the majority of browsers overnight. As many libraries included these changes in their code, this "mass breakage" of the World Wide Web occured within a few weeks of each other.

This hardly went unnoticed - many retrocomputers and computer enthusiasts on the MSFN Forums decried the breakages. The problem turn out to not just affect old versions of Chromium. Pale Moon, for instance, is also affected, as are most "alternative" browsers that don't toe the Chromium and Firefox line. Thus, these changes have seriously threatened the open and standards-based foundations of the World Wide Web.

For more information, see: https://blog.interlinked.us/66/when-the-world-wide-web-goes-on-strike-how-do-you-fight-back

What Does This Extension Do?

Polyfills are designed to address just this problem. Polyfills are JavaScript "hacks" that add support for a JavaScript feature which isn't natively supported by the browser.

The ChromeFill extension dynamically injects polyfills into webpages before they load in order to add support for JavaScript that wasn't supported when the browser was released. By adding the extension, the polyfills are injected on every page you visit, automatically adding support for these newer browser features so that sites which use this newer JavaScript are better supported.

Browser Support

This is intended for use with older versions of Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Iron, etc.). If you are using a recent or supported version of Chrome, you do not need this extension.

How To Install

This isn't available in the Chrome Web Store, but it's as easy as 1-2-3 to install it:

  1. Navigate to chrome://extensions/ in your browser

  2. Toggle "Developer Mode" to on.

  3. Click "Load Unpackaged" and upload the unzipped download of this repository.

That's it! Sites that no longer work properly in older versions of Chromium (such as StackOverflow, for instance) that can benefit from ChromeFill will now do so. No manual action on sites is needed.

Specific Polyfills

Transpiling is also done on the fly to address:

However, this functionality is disabled by default and only enabled on a per-site basis (see below).

More polyfills may be added over time to expand compatability, especially as breakage continues to increase. Contributions to add more polyfills are welcome.

Other Fixes

Medium.com sites erroneously block certain user agents, in particular user agents with the word "Iron" in them. This extension removes the word Iron from any offending user agents so that medium.com sites work.

Sites Known To Have Breakage Fixed By This Extension*

  • GitHub (globalThis, nullish coalescing)
  • StackExchange (globalThis)
  • Canvas (globalThis)
  • Discord (fromEntries)
  • Discourse (queueMicroTask)
  • Rockstar Social Club (Intl.RelativeTimeFormat)
  • Spotify (Intl.RelativeTimeFormat)
  • Medium, Slack (user agent blocking)

* Some breakage historically has been fixed, but new breakage may well have later been introduced that remains unaddressed.

Nullish Coalescing and Optional Chaining

Nullish coalescing and optional chaining are the two villains at large today, completely unsupported by UXP and Chromium < 80. These operators likely can't be polyfilled, and will need to be transpiled on the fly. This is a known issue that will need to be addressed to unbreak a growing amount of the breakage that exists on the web today.

If you encounter either of these operators on a website, you should complain to the webmaster or file a support ticket. Because these can't be polyfilled, the use of these operators forms a serious accessibility barrier for browsers and they should be avoided in all web development.

Currently, this is some experimental support in this extension for auto transpiling using Babel standalone in order to address this syntax incompatibility. However, this is slow, and CPU and memory intensive. It is really only intended as a last resort. It is not a solution. For this reason, this functionality is not enabled by default and is whitelisted on a per-site basis.

Will the extension be upgraded to Manifest V3?

No, because that wouldn't make any sense.

Manifest V3 is the most recent version of manifests for extensions. As of January 2022, new public and unlisted Manifest V2 extensions can no longer be published in the Chrome Web Store, and they'll essentially be deprecated throughout 2022. However, Manifest V3 only supports Chromium 88+, so it would be pointless to use the newer manifest type for this extension. This extension is specifically targeted at older versions of Chromium, so the older manifest must be used.

This extension will be available open-source for the public and will not be published in the Chrome Web Store, since that is moving to Manifest V3 exclusively, which would preclude support for Chrome 87 and earlier. You can always install it manually in Chrome by enabling Developer Mode for extensions.

Doesn't this promote the usage of outdated/obsolete browsers?

Nobody's telling you to use an outdated browser or to use this extension. Fundamentally, however, we believe in browser choice (as well as operating system choice). Chromium version 70 (released Oct. 2018) is the last version of Chromium that allows use of the old UI (naturally, globalThis was added in Chromium 71). However, some people do not like the new UI and prefer to the use the older one. We believe that individuals who assume the relevant risks have the right to use the software they wish, and the reality is some people are going to use these older browsers, whether Google wants them to or not. This project specifically aims to bridge this gap in support for older Chromium browsers. This project assumes no liability for security issues arising from use of an older browser version.

With that, happy browsing!