Supported Browsers

The output of wasm-bindgen includes a JS file, and as a result it's good to know what browsers that file is expected to be used in! By default the output uses ES modules which isn't implemented in all browsers today, but when using a bundler (like Webpack) you should be able to produce output suitable for all browsers.

Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Edge browsers are all supported by wasm-bindgen. If you find a problem in one of these browsers please report it as we'd like to fix the bug! If you find a bug in another browser we would also like to be aware of it!

Caveats

• IE 11 - wasm-bindgen by default requires support for WebAssembly, but no version of IE currently supports WebAssembly. You can support IE by compiling wasm files to JS using wasm2js (you can see an example of doing this too). Note that at this time no bundler will do this by default, but we'd love to document plugins which do this if you are aware of one!

• Edge before 79+ - the TextEncoder and TextDecoder APIs, which wasm-bindgen uses to encode/decode strings between JS and Rust, were not available before version 79. You can polyfill this with at least one of two strategies:

  1. If using a bundler, you can likely configure the bundler to polyfill these types by default. For example if you're using Webpack you can use the ProvidePlugin interface like so after also adding text-encoding to your package.json

     const webpack = require('webpack');
     module.exports = {
         plugins: [
             new webpack.ProvidePlugin({
               TextDecoder: ['text-encoding', 'TextDecoder'],
               TextEncoder: ['text-encoding', 'TextEncoder']
             })
         ]
         // ... other configuration options
     };
     

     Warning: doing this implies the polyfill will always be used, even if native APIs are available. This has a very significant performance impact (the polyfill was measured to be 100x slower in Chromium)!

  2. If you're not using a bundler you can also include support manually by adding a <script> tag which defines the TextEncoder and TextDecoder globals. This StackOverflow question has some example usage and MDN has a TextEncoder polyfill implementation to get you started as well.

• BigInt and u64 - currently the WebAssembly specification for the web forbids the usage of 64-bit integers (Rust types i64 and u64) in exported/imported functions. When using wasm-bindgen, however, u64 is allowed! The reason for this is that it's translated to the BigInt type in JS. The BigInt class is supported by all major browsers starting in the following versions: Chrome 67+, Firefox 68+, Edge 79+, and Safari 14+.

If you find other incompatibilities please report them to us! We'd love to either keep this list up-to-date or fix the underlying bugs :)