Cross-Browser Compatibility and React.js Web Apps

Sometimes I feel that events in life happen in a sequence so that you regularly come across 'cringe' moments. Like when you have sand in your mouth or you hear the excruciating sound of nails against a chalk board. For me, personally, the worst cringe-worthy moment is when I come across a really bad web app or website. When I say bad, I mean Internet Explorer bad (just kidding, it’s a nice browser). Directionless navigation, features that are not working, bad design, and painful UX. But, the biggest problem is missing cross-browser compatibility.

Why React?

React is simply a UI and functionality library for JavaScript-based apps. We recently talked about React.js in our last post, Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework in 2018. So, in this post, we would look in more detail at how React.js helps in the development of cross-browser compatible web apps.

Coming back to the question at hand, what makes React so great?

The biggest advantage is that you can write JavaScript code in React, and the transpiler will automatically take care of the compatibility problems due to version or language differences. It comes with a great deal of community support as well and has native integration with tools that help in browser compatibility like Babel. Not exactly JS but it is JSX, which is even more powerful than JavaScript.

“Write once, use everywhere.”

Cross-Platform Approach

One of the remarkable points for developing an application using React Native is that it offers cross-platform capabilities. Let’s imagine you have to build an application for iOS and Android. All you have to do is make source code for the application in general. React Native reuses the JavaScript that you wrote and adds a dimension of cross platform to it. All you have to do is specify the specific platform that you have in mind and it will take care of the rest. React Native offers within itself features.

Cross-Browser Compatibility With React Native

While a cross-platform approach helps us to build robust applications, cross-browser compatibility, to some extent, remains a pain. We turn to its parent ecosystem, the biggest benefit of using React native is that it is similar to React and even Preact so if you want you can use this to your advantage. While building a web app you can leverage the predefined set up and save yourself from the hard-work. It comes with a PWA setup too, using service workers without any additional burden.

It even offers brilliant features, like live reload, that allow you to update or change the source code on the go. It is really impressive as it brings a certain sense of freedom that other frameworks/libraries simply don’t offer.

In addition, React implements a totally different DOM system which is independent of the browser. The implementation is done in order make the application cross-browser compatible.
Memory leakage is less when you use React Native, which directly results in improved performance.

Synthetic Events

In the case of event handling React Native has a similar approach to React. Event handling is similar to DOM manipulation with little syntactic changes. Synthetic events are defined by React in accordance with the W3C specifications. Instead of stings, you can pass a function event handler (JSX is really amazing!).

React Arsenal

There is no point in repeating the extensive coding functionalities. Thanks to the limitless community support (Facebook has been investing a lot of resources) it is easier for developers to find various tools. If you read previous blogs about Babel and Webpack, you'll know how helpful it is to have their support. The React framework ensures the proper functioning of both of these tools along with a few others. The bottomline is you can go crazy about using library functions, they will take care of smaller sized bundles and cross-browser compatibility too.