Polyfills and Chrome

In an upcoming post, I'll touch on the IndexedDB, adding some persistence to the Jukebox. However, for now, a small post about bugs.

After doing some testing and getting my feet wet with the IndexedDB, I tried to do my first insertion - a hash containing a string and a Blob, and immediately saw that everything blew up. Why? After a little searching, I found that blobs are not a supported insertion type for the IndexedDB in Chrome. (This is where you try unsuccessfully to convert me to Firefox)

Software bugs exist. (So do hardware bugs... that's a completely different level of complexity) It's hard when you write applications on software stack, and run into bugs, feature limitations, etc., because it forces you to think in somewhat unnatural ways to accomplish what you're intending to accomplish - you're expecting the native API to support something; it doesn't; you have to write some code to work around that. And that piece of code... that's a polyfill.

I've been hit by a few issues in Chrome/Webkit. It's annoying. It's to the point at times that I've written my own polyfill to either manage the problem in a satisfactory way, or work around the problem completely. But, that's life as a software developer.