es-shims/es5-shim

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

7077 stars · 876 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

es5-shim is a JavaScript library that monkey-patches legacy JavaScript engines to provide ECMAScript 5 methods that can be faithfully emulated, with a companion es5-sham for methods that can only be approximated. It lets developers write ES5 code that runs in older engines like legacy browsers.

Use cases

• support ES5 array methods like map, filter, and forEach in old browsers
• run modern JavaScript code in legacy engines like IE8
• polyfill Function.prototype.bind and Date.now in old environments
• make ES5 code run without runtime errors on outdated JavaScript engines
• add ECMAScript 5 compatibility to a legacy web project

When to choose

• you must support legacy browsers or engines lacking ES5 features
• you want a well-tested, comprehensive ES5 polyfill loaded before other scripts
• you need per-method standalone shims for targeted patching

When to avoid

• your target environments already support ES5 natively
• you need ES6+ features like promises, arrow functions, or classes
• you cannot tolerate the partial or silently-failing behavior of es5-sham methods

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

developer-tools web-development developer-tools browser cross-platform polyfill shim es5 ecmascript javascript legacy-browser-support nodejs

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="es-shims/es5-shim")