Non Chrome Android Browser. How Broken ?

[PBK]

Polymer Team,

 

I know polymer does not support the original non chrome android browser, but how  deeply incompatible is it really ? 

I assume you guys have evaluated that ? What are the areas that are the most problematic and how much work would it take  to make it work ?

[PBK]

Any chance someone in the polymer can shed some light on this ?

Thanks !

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 2:02:25 PM UTC-8, PBK wrote:

Polymer Team,

 

I know polymer does not support the original non chrome android browser, but how  deeply incompatible is it  ? 

[Eric Bidelman]

Hi PBK, 

I'm not sure anyone on the team has spent enough time investigating to give an estimate on how much work it would take. We've deliberately taken the stance to not support legacy browsers. For Android, that's KitKat and up.

Polymer uses a lot of new technologies (custom elements, shadow dom, html imports, pointer events, template,...). Some of the simpler polyfills like html imports may work in legacy browsers (or require a few tweaks), but others like the Shadow DOM polyfill will likely never work.

Follow Polymer on Google+: plus.google.com/107187849809354688692
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[PBK]

Thanks Eric !

 

I would very really love to use web components and Polymer for my current and future projects.

 

Every time I read an angular directive or some jquery based UI code I wish I could avoid it and write things in the way html and js should have been to start with, which is the web components way.

 

But we are a hitting a massive roadblock at this stage as to how to ship on Android. I am sure you will agree that requiring Android 4.4 from end users is a non-starter for commercial apps ( 2.5% as of last update of the android dashboard)

 

It is somewhat ironic that we have a path to use and ship using Polymer on IOS and even on Windows Phone but not on Android.

 

So it seems that the only path to allow shipping apps within at least 18 months on Android is actually to get the Chromium webview in the apk. We had a thread a few weeks ago related to the new mobile chrome apps toolchain but it died.

I think having that pushed up the priority list within Google is critical to adoption of Polymer for mobile development.

Let me re-ask what I had asked a while ago and got no answer. What can we do to help lobbying to move that up the priority list ?

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 2:02:25 PM UTC-8, PBK wrote: