Ecmascript 5 and browsers

[cations]

Hello I am new to JavaScript.

I was looking at browser usage statistics at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp and was completely shocked at the results.

I expected at least 50% of people still using IE8. I didn't realize that IE's market share is so low at 18%.

Does this mean if I want to create a public Website potentially available for 75% of the English Speaking population I can feel confident to use EcmaScript 5 features with some kind of EcmaScript 5 shim package as backup?

I found an EcmaScript5 package at https://github.com/kriskowal/es5-shim but the author doesn't make many promises:

"As closely as possible to ES5" is not very close. Many of these shims are intended only to allow code to be written to ES5 without causing run-time errors in older engines. In many cases, this means that these shims cause many ES5 methods to silently fail. Decide carefully whether this is what you want.

Is there an EcmaScript 5 shim package that I can include with my JavaScript so I can use EcmaScript 5 features freely or if I want to get at least 75% English Speaking audience should I just stick to EcmaScript 3?

Thank you.

[Jeff Mott]

I was looking at browser usage statistics at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp and was completely shocked at the results.

I wouldn't rely too much on W3Schools stats. They don't take a sampling from a wide variety of sites. Those stats are only for their site, and the demographic for a web dev site are the least likely to be using IE.

The resource most commonly referenced these days is StatsCounter. Using these stats, IE is higher than W3Schools, but still lower than you expected. Chrome has been significantly cutting into IE's market share.

[rtrethewey]

Actually, StatCounter shows similar results for IE8 (14.35&#37 when you request the information by Browser Version, so it's reasonable to believe that your website will see numbers in that range.