How Baseline Can Help You Ship Less JavaScript

Many JavaScript dependencies in your project have become obsolete as the web platform catches up. Smashing Magazine explores Baseline, a project that tells you which browser features are safe to use across Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. In a typical mid-sized app, you'll find somewhere between sixty and ninety kilobytes of dependencies that browsers can now handle natively: date and number formatting, list joining, and relative time expressions. Before deleting a library, ask three questions: Is this feature safe for my actual users' browsers, what does the swap really cost, and does the platform feature cover my full use case? The biggest wins come from internationalization APIs in the Intl namespace, which can replace timeago.js, pluralize, numeral, and humanize-duration—a savings of roughly fourteen kilobytes gzipped.

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