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Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

Hello @superkuh, if you happen to revisit this, could you let me know which browser and version you were using? It would help me decide how far back I should support.

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Hi susam thanks for the heads up on IRC. I'm using an ancient firefox fork from ~2015 called Palemoon 26.5. I use it because it's the best available on my computer with the good screen reader and text to speech setup. I am not a javascript developer but my JS console says

"SyntaxError: Missing ; before statement" on line 136: let consoles = window.wander.consoles

I'd bet it's that 'let' that's emcascript6. I sort of have a polyfill extension for some things from es6 but not all.

Thank you. This makes a lot of sense. I need to think it through since 'let' is one of the things about modern JavaScript that I quite like, so I need to decide whether I really want to go back to using 'var' again.

To be honest, I resisted adopting ES6 features for quite a long time because I was concerned about exactly this kind of situation, where a modern feature might not work in an older browser that is still in use. However, in 2022, prompted by ESLint's no-var rule [1], I began using ES6 features in my code [2]. Now I find myself wondering whether my earlier, more conservative approach to JavaScript might have been the better approach.

In any case, thank you very much for following up on this thread. It has given me something to think about.

[1] https://eslint.org/docs/latest/rules/no-var

[2] https://codeberg.org/susam/texme/commit/8e31dbf

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