Browser Support

The browsers that we support are specified in the .browserlistrc file located in the platform/app project. While we leverage the latest language features when writing code, we rely on babel to transpile our code so that it can run in the browsers that we support.

In Practice

The OHIF Viewer is capable of running on:

• IE 11
• FireFox
• Chrome
• Safari
• Edge

However, we do not have the resources to adequately test and maintain bug free functionality across all of these. In order to push web based medical imaging forward, we focus our development efforts on recent version of modern evergreen browsers.

Our support of older browsers equates to our willingness to review PRs for bug fixes, and target their minimum JS support whenever possible.

Polyfills

A polyfill, or polyfiller, is a piece of code (or plugin) that provides the technology that you, the developer, expect the browser to provide natively.

An example of a polyfill is that you expect Array.prototype.filter to exist, but for some reason, the browser that's being used has not implemented that language feature yet. Our earlier transpilation will rectify syntax discrepancies, but unimplemented features require a "temporary" implementation. That's where polyfills step in.

We previously used polyfill io, but due to a security vulnerability in the library, it's necessary to switch to alternative services.