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A new browserify version is upon us, just in time for the FESTIVE SEASON during which we in the northern hemisphere at mid to high latitudes huddle for warmth around oxidizing hydrocarbons!

There are 2 big changes in v3 but most code should be relatively unaffected.

shiny new Buffer

feross forked the buffer-browserify package to create native-buffer-browserify, a Buffer implementation that uses Uint8Array to get buf[i] notation and parity with the node core Buffer api without the performance hit of the previous implementation and a much smaller file size. The downside is that Buffer now only works in browsers with Uint8Array and DataView support. All the other modules should maintain existing browser support.

Update: a shim was added to in 3.1 for Uint8Array and DataView support. Now you can use Buffer in every browser.

direct builtin dependencies

In v3, browserify no longer depends on browser-builtins, in favor of depending on packages directly. Instead of having some separate packages and some files in a builtin/ directory like browser-builtins, browserify now uses only external packages for the shims it uses. By only using external packages we can keep browserify core focused purely on the static analysis and bundling machinery while letting the individual packages worry about things like browser compatibility and parity with the node core API as it evolves.

Individual, tiny packages should also be much easier for newcomers to contribute packages toward because they won't need to get up to speed with all the other pieces going on and the packages can have their own tests and documentation. Additionally, each package may find uses in other projects beside browserify more easily and if people want variations on the versions of shims that ship with browserify core this is easier to do when everything is separate.

Back when we were using browser-builtins there was a large latency between pushing out fixes to the individual packages and getting them into browserify core because we had to wait on browser-builtins to upgrade the semvers in its package.json. With direct dependencies we get much lower latency for package upgrades and much more granular control over upgrading packages.

Here is the list of packages we now directly depend on in v3:

That's it! If you're bold enough to give v3 a spin, just do:

npm install -g browserify