Almost party-time for Web Components!
From the very first time I heard about Web Components from a 2012 Google I/O talk back in the stone age i was extremely exited and convinced this was the awesome NEAR future for web development. I saw this as a fundamental revolution solving a great many really painful parts of developing web apps at the time. I was an instant fanboy.
But somehow things got dragged out to an extreme degree. Unsurprisingly Microsoft was awfully slow, but even Firefox has been dragging their feet.
I have been checking out https://www.webcomponents.org/ routinely over the years, but for all that time its been always the same. Firefox and IE/Edge did not support the key features.
This slowness from the browser vendors have been driving web developer nuts and generated a lot of anger and frustration. Most telling is the votable platform status page from Edge where people are able to both vote and voice their opinion. Go read for yourself on the voting page for Shadow DOM and Custom Elements. Those two parts of the Web Components spec has been the most requested features for years and Microsoft despite lots of promises back in 2015 has only had the features labeled as “UNDER CONSIDERATION”.
Because of limited browser support and the need for some troublesome poly-fills I haven’t been able to deploy Web Components in any production product. We have lots of customers with IE browsers and we don’t want to slow them down with poly-fills as dependencies in our libraries. We currently use mostly React and it does the job, but its a solution that doesn’t get me exited and it is actually quite stressful to use for some advances use cases (I work a lot with highly interactive web based maps that are extremely state-rich and with React you have to be ultra careful to not trigger a “Fucking render call” when your not supposed to)
The OMG!! WTF!! … is this REAL?? moment
Today I went to WebComponents.org for a routine check, expectations were not high as I have been disillusioned about the ever seeing full browser support since at least 2015.
But then I saw it FINALLY Firefox had gotten their shit together and was offering full support ( from October 23rd ).
That’s really AWESOME i thought … but … Edge. As long as Edge hasn’t changed we still cannot go for it. At least this puts more pressure on Microsoft to at least consider to get their heads out of their buts.
Anyway… I tend to do a routine check on the platform feature vote to see if there are any news. And what did I see?
IN DEVELOPMENT!!!!!
I don’t know when they changed the status from UNDER CONSIDERATION to IN DEVELOPMENT. But the news had passed me by in silence. But this is really significant. 72% (my super scientific exact estimate) of the work performed by front end frameworks and libraries can be if we are to believe Microsoft this time be transferred to the browsers in the near future?
How about it Microsoft? How far away are you from giving the web developer community a reason to PARTY??!!!
