App broken on iOS Safari 9 due to SyntaxError

[arggh]

I know it's iOS Safari 9, but our app used to work on this browser with Meteor 1.8.2. I think supporting old iOS versions is important, since lots of people have old iPads laying around that they use for browsing the web. They can't update the browser past the OS version and Apple doesn't release updates to those old, yet functional devices.

We are updating our app to the latest Meteor 1.10.2 and now the app is broken on iOS Safari 9.

Related to unresolved & closed issue: #10957

The error message:

SyntaxError: Invalid parameters or function name in strict mode

[brianlukoff]

1.10.2 seems to have this issue on old versions of Safari in general -- even a clean install exhibits the same problem.

[filipenevola]

Hi, do you have an easy way to test in old Safari?

Maybe this core-js upgrade was the cause:
330a6cf

Also have you tried to use setMinimumBrowserVersions https://docs.meteor.com/changelog.html#changes-18?

[brianlukoff]

We have been using BrowserStack for testing, which is great:
https://www.browserstack.com/

We do have setMinimumBrowserVersions set to require Safari 11.1 but it doesn't seem to matter here.

[arggh]

Hi, do you have an easy way to test in old Safari?

@filipenevola if you are on a Mac, you can install Xcode and launch the Simulator. From there, you can install different iOS versions and run them on various virtual Apple devices. You can even use desktop Safari's debugger.

[brettg2]

+1

I get a similar error in Safari 8...

To reproduce, run the command "meteor create simple-todos" then run the app. Goto browserstack and use safari 8 and go to the localhost server at the meteor port number in use (http://localhost:3000). The console will show 45 errors:

[sonhle]

Hi, I am experiencing the same error with Meteor 1.10.2 and safari 9.1.2. Any workaround? Thanks,

[sonhle]

I downgraded Meteor 1.8.1 to fix the error. Still have the error with 1.8.2 & 1.8.3

[ericoe]

I'm late to the party, but I'll +1. Upgrading to 1.10.2 breaks us on iOS 9.
While using 1.8.3, we run native on iOS9 and we can support iOS8 via Safari.
After upgrade to 1.10.2, we have to set minimum iOS10x for native app and we cannot run in browser to support older iOS.

[nathanschwarz]

It's not just on IOS, tested on Mac Os today with Safari 9.1.2.
It throw "SyntaxError: Invalid parameters or function name in strict mode.".

[filipenevola]

Hi, could you test with Meteor 1.10.3-beta.5? meteor update --release 1.10.3-beta.5. thanks.

[brianlukoff]

Still does not work on 1.10.3-beta.4 -- I created a clean app and used Browserstack to test on Safari 7.1 and got errors similar to @brettg2 above.

[filipenevola]

Hi @brianlukoff did you on beta.5? BTW beta.4 was broken due to version constraints at least if you use accounts-password so maybe you tested with beta.3?

Please let me know!

[brianlukoff]

Just retested on beta.5 with the same result -- I am creating a clean app with meteor create test and then running meteor update --release 1.10.3-beta.5.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[arggh]

Not stale AFAIK

[ericoe]

Not stale

[filipenevola]

Hey, this is not stale indeed, we are working on this.

We know that this broke the first time here https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blame/830b8a40cb5df665ef9688bd7ac6cece3b1f4223/tools/isobuild/linker.js#L688 but reverting this change breaks the minifier when using dynamic imports.

We are analyzing if upgrading terser or using a different approach would fix the issue but no luck so far.

As @renanccastro is working on many changes on related code he is going to check this in the tree-shaking branch #11164

---

@denihs has added back the BrowserStack #11166 test to our CircleCI so we are going to run it again against every PR to avoid unintentional breaking changes again in the future. This test was removed a long time ago but we think this is important and then we are adding it back.

For now we are going to merge this BrowserStack test using Safari 11 as minimum version but we want to reduce this version to 9 again, if we are able to fix the issue on tree-shaking branch.

We decided to merge using Safari 11 now to at least avoid more breaking changes in the near future.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[StorytellerCZ]

Not an Apple user, is Safari 9 still a thing at this point? @renanccastro

[arggh]

Not an Apple user, is Safari 9 still a thing at this point? @renanccastro

I think the statement in the issue description still stands:

I think supporting old iOS versions is important, since lots of people have old iPads laying around that they use for browsing the web. They can't update the browser past the OS version and Apple doesn't release updates to those old, yet functional devices.

...of course it's up for discussion whether that's reason enough, considering the minuscule market share of old iOS versions, but since it used to work... 🤷

[ericoe]

This is an old issue. So from an MDG biz decision, not acting on this for this long I think has in many ways obviated the need to fix it. Existing Meteor apps have had to find a workaround or punt. This was a very hard choice for us to tell our users we cannot support them anymore.

When new Cordova breaks old native iOS/android builds, we have usually had the good fortune to tell customers to use a BROWSER on their old devices.

My request to MDG is to do their best to test and support old browsers

[filipenevola]

@ericoe since this issue happened we had upgraded our Browserstack tests, reactivated them and we are running them before any releases so new regressions are not going to come up, at least not as a surprise.