Disallow my entire web-app if the browser doesn't "support" Polymer

[Kiran Rao]

My basic requirement is that I only want the user to use my polymer-powered web-app on a supported browser. I do not want any fallback or graceful degradation.
So, if the user's browser is not good enough for polymer, I'd like to direct the user to install a more modern browser.

I'm aware that "supported browser" could mean many things - does the browser support Custom elements? HTML imports? Shadow DOM? Or is the browser at least sufficiently equipped such that these features could be poly-filled?
In my case a reasonable definition would be - "Hey, can all the polymer features be poly-filled in this browser?"


I've already gone through the these threads that deal with similar topics:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/polymer-dev/zBMxSgbDATE
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/polymer-dev/9NAGVB2apdA
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/polymer-dev/XmLnxeZo-9k

While some of these seem to answer my query partially, I still didn't see a one-place reference on this. Is there a way in Polymer to detect whether the browser "supports" polymer? Or am I better off detecting individual features that I know my app will use?

[Eric Bidelman]

My $0.02: it's never a good idea to block users. If they're in an unsupported browser, allow them to enter, but tread with caution.

That said, Polymer's polyfills support the latest browsers. Could you use something like http://www.browser-update.org?  Customize it to throw the prompt for unsupported browsers?

Follow Polymer on Google+: plus.google.com/107187849809354688692
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Polymer" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to polymer-dev...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/polymer-dev/330bc14f-db68-45e8-bb32-63eed03a1423%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Kiran Rao]

@Eric,

Yes- I agree that its not a good idea to block users. However the app I'm talking about is going to be an experimental one - not a public app. Guess I should've made that clear from the start :-)

The thing with polymer (and also with Dart BTW) is that in an unsupported browser things start looking messy (for example the curly braces for the data binding syntax show up as-is). For the purposes of my app, I'd rather just ask them to use a newer browser. The awesome thing about the web is you always have modern browsers available - even if you're on Windows XP.

Thanks for the link to browser-update.org! It fits my needs for now.