Why is IE8 getting a script error when using Facebook's React.js

Question

I'm using facebook's react. Not sure whats causing this error, seams to be react itself?

I'm getting an IE8 script error: Object doesn't support this property or method on line 10898 for react.js

I'm not using the minified version, this is the dev version that is commented. Anyone else having an issue with facebook's react not working in IE8? Wondering if there's some sort of setting that has to be used for react to work in IE???

Answer 1

Make sure to add the polyfills listed at the end of this page:Refs and the DOM

Note also that JSXTransformer.js is currently incompatible with IE8, so you do need to precompile your JSX.

Answer 2

I had this same issue and it turns out it was because of how I was building the bundle.

If you're using webpack or browserify you need to "envify" it. There are places in the code base that look like this:

if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== "production") {
  doSomethingNotIE8Compatible()
}

To remove these, the react build uses the envify browserify transform to go and replace the process.env.NODE_ENV instances with the string with the value of your local terminal environmental variable.

For example, the first line becomes:

if ("production" !== "production") 

After this you should use uglify to remove the dead code to save size.

Finally, you need to run the code through an ES3-ifer to get rid of some small things that are legal in ES5 but not ES3. For example, catch function calls.

TLDR: at my company we have had a lot more success just using the CDN build rather than trying to get it bundling correctly.