Browser retro compatibility before 2020 : ||= operator

[Name-less]

📝 Browser compatibility under 2020

The last version of ckeditor is not working for browser versions under 2020 because of the new operator ||= which is present only once on the ckeditor project.

This is problematic for a lot of our users that have old computers and browsers.

Please, on the function _copySelectedFragmentWithMarkers replace :
fakeMarkersRangesInsideRange[markerName] ||= writer.createRangeIn(fragment);

By :
if(fakeMarkersRangesInsideRange[markerName] == undefined){
fakeMarkersRangesInsideRange[markerName] = writer.createRangeIn(fragment);
}

And this will work like a charm for older browsers.

For more informations about the ||= operator, see :
https://developer.mozilla.org/fr/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Logical_OR_assignment

📃 Other details

• Browser: Every browser older than 2020
• OS: every OS
• CKEditor version: 5

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If you'd like to see this improvement implemented, add a 👍 reaction to this post.

[Reinmar]

Hi :) We should probably do a better job at communicating which browsers we intend to support. But 4y old ones won't be on the list for sure.

In this case, this may be a single operator now, but this is a large project and we guard the ES features used by defining the target ES version when compiling everything together. If you meant that we could easily remove the use of this operator – yes, we can. But it may return next week in someone else's code (including our deps).

Anyways, the solution is to use Babel when integrating CKE5 to transpile the code down to the ES version that you want to target. You know your audience and how backwards-compatible you want your product to be.

[Name-less]

Thanks for your answer, a better solution is to use an alternative that respect backwards compatibility like https://www.tiny.cloud/: )

[Reinmar]

TinyMCE has a very similar approach to supporting old browsers to us: https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/tinymce/latest/support/

And, once again, you can use Babel to ensure compatibility (at least from the syntax perspective) with the old browser engines.