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Comment by DCoder | Hacker News Reader

> as long as I delete Array.prototype.whatever first, I get an enumerable property when I polyfill it.

The key point there is "deleting first". If you assign to a property without deleting it first, it continues to be non-enumerable.

> it's certainly not a matter where MooTools would have to completely rework what they're doing

> it'd be easy enough to use a compatability shim on the site side

MooTools has released a patch for this problem. The problem is indeed the sites that have been built and left to their own devices.

This is not at all dissimilar to Windows dragging around garbage needed "to permit four programs written in 1994 to continue running" [1].

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031103-00/?p=...

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I definitely agree with that last point. I get the desire to keep the top 100 sites going--I used to be on test for Mozilla, and you really don't want to be the browser that can't view a significant chunk of the web.

But that sort of fear-based commitment to backwards compatibility didn't do Windows any favors. I'd really hate to see it become endemic to the web.

I can see both sides of the argument here — from the technical point of view, it is certainly unappealing to maintain such kludges, and from the business point of view, "it's been working fine so whatever changed on the other end is broken, we won't spend money fixing it"…

Do you have any thoughts on how this quagmire can be avoided on the web? I can imagine solutions similar to Ghostery's stub scripts, but putting that in a browser, let alone many browsers, sounds like a large legal problem.

Aside from something like forced namespacing, I don't, really. I suppose being able to pin the JS version in the browser might help, similar to quirks mode of old, but that leads to another version of the BC issue.

But ultimately this is a question of the lesser of two evils, and I do sort of think that the real solution here is that site owners own their sites and their decisions as to what libraries to use, and thus own their own downtime. Browser vendors can't reasonably try to take that responsibility on themselves in an uncurated ecosystem, especially in cases like MooTools where the library vendor did something long known to be questionable.

That may be idealistic, but I think it's the only path that really works in the long run. Unfortunately, in browser market share is king so I doubt that attitude will be adopted. But I definitely wouldn't buy any argument that it's for the user's benefit--it's all about not wanting to get blame splashed back.

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