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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> have to agree on what "now" means, even when governments change DST rules with very little notice.

I didn't spot how Temporal fixes this. What happens when "now" changes? Does the library get updated and pushed out rapidly via browsers?

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Right, browsers own it instead of websites needing to rebuild Moment.js bundles. Additionally, most browsers pass the ownership further to the user's OS as the IANA timezone database is a useful system-level service and best updated at the cadence of OS "required" updates.

I believe V8 / chrome bundles IANA time zones into the zoneinfo64 resource bundle. I'm not actually sure they hit the system tzdb at all.

Typically time zone data is updated in IANA's time zone database. That data would need to be updated in the implementation. In this case, the browser would need to update their time zone data.

Depending on the situation, the data lives either within the browser or within the OS. Chrome releases ship versions of tzdata that correspond to the version of tzdata shipped with the ICU it uses, and they do backport updates to prior Chrome releases within a certain window. Apple has a sideband way of deploying tzdata to all devices that doesn't appear via the normal Software Update mechanism. So it all depends on which particular OS/browser combo you're interested in and the decisions those owners made.

This is why I'm sticking with moment.js for now. I don't like that it's not immutable, but I value bundling timezone data into the app too much. Our customers are likely to use outdated browsers at their workplaces (we even had to maintain IE11 compatibility a bit too long for our liking).

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