Internet Explorer Encounters Modern JavaScript
Description
A two-part meme that captures the historical struggle of web developers. The top section contains simple text: 'Me: *use lambda expressions*' followed by 'Internet Explorer:'. The bottom section features a heavily distorted, deep-fried, and red-tinted image of the character Wallace from the British claymation series 'Wallace and Gromit'. His face is contorted in a look of horror and confusion. Below him is the caption, 'what the fuck did you just bring upon this cursed land'. This meme humorously personifies the outdated Internet Explorer browser, which for years lacked support for modern JavaScript features like lambda expressions (arrow functions in ES6). For any developer who had to ensure their code worked on IE, the browser's reaction to modern syntax was akin to a cursed being witnessing an unholy artifact. The post's own caption, 'Rest in peace IE. Or maybe in pieces?', adds to the sentiment of catharsis now that the browser is deprecated
Comments
10Comment deleted
Babel wasn't just a transpiler; it was an exorcist for websites possessed by the ghost of Internet Explorer
One fat-arrow saved 12 keystrokes - then Babel injected 6 KB of polyfills so IE11 wouldn’t flatline. Most expensive “micro” optimization since we thought SOAP was future-proof
The real horror is explaining to the PM why we need 47 polyfills and a Babel config that looks like a PhD thesis just so Karen from accounting can still use the expense system on her 2011 desktop
The real horror isn't that IE doesn't support arrow functions - it's that somewhere, a PM is still asking why we can't just 'make it work in IE8' because 'some enterprise clients might still use it.' Meanwhile, your webpack config has more polyfills than actual application code, and your bundle size has grown to the point where IE would timeout loading it anyway. The cursed land isn't the lambda expression; it's the technical debt spreadsheet tracking which ES6 features you can actually use in production
Lambdas in JS for IE11? That's enterprise transpilation black magic - turning one arrow into a 50KB IIFE labyrinth
IE sees => and throws SCRIPT1002; Babel sees a procurement policy and throws 300KB of core-js
IE11 support means every arrow function rides Babel back to ES5 and returns as function() with var _this = this sprinkled everywhere
Me: *Using let to declare variable* IE: let me fuck you Comment deleted
🤣🤣🤣🤣 Comment deleted
Rip in pepperoni Comment deleted