Introducing ‘My Browser’ - Andy Bell - Front-End Developer

July 20th, 2018

Andy describes the technical approach he took building his handy reporting tool, My Browser:

Although the site is built with bleeding edge technology such as web components, it’s built with a progressive-first approach. This means that in order to get the best experience, you need to be on a modern browser, but to do the most basic function—reporting data, you can still do it by pressing a “generate report” button, which is the default state.

Not only is this a liberating way to work, it really pays off in performance:

We’re given so much for free to make a progressively enhanced website or web app. We’ve got feature detection and @supports in CSS which means that “My Browser” ships with no polyfills, fallbacks or hacks like Autoprefixer. The app degrades gracefully instead.

This has been a very refreshing way to work that I’ve enjoyed a lot. The fact that the whole thing comes in around 25kb tells you how effective progressive enhancement can be for performance too.