In defense of polyfills

Polyfilling the gaps title above a tub of Polycell Multi Purpose Polyfilla, set against a wall of blue square tiles.

Lea Verou pushes back on the claim that polyfills harm the web platform. She argues the need for fallbacks persists regardless, and banning polyfills just scatters worse ad-hoc code everywhere. Standardized APIs decouple code from the spec, so libraries swap freely. The real problem is a slow standards process that waits for implementer interest before demonstrated need.

lea.verou.me/blog/2026/polyfills