Deprecating `clipboard-polyfill`

[lgarron]

Deprecating `clipboard-polyfill`

[aduth]

Thanks for the note @lgarron . At least for the short-term, I believe that we are continuing to support Internet Explorer 11, since we see a non-insignificant amount of traffic from users of it (~2%). I suspect and hope that this will trend lower in the coming months as we approach Microsoft's June sunsetting date to a point where we could reconsider dropping support.

As you noticed, we only use a very small fraction of the Clipboard API. And while we could simply inline a backward-compatible solution, our current polyfill approach lets us write code in a way that we can easily drop those legacy implementations in the future.

The only issue for us currently is TypeScript 4.5 compatibility which, aside from the upstream pull request, I had explored a workaround which could let us upgrade independent of clipboard-polyfill (edit: now merged in #5977).

I think our best course of action would be to continue using the polyfill as-is, like the first option you mentioned. If/when we can drop support for Internet Explorer, I expect we could safely drop the polyfill.

[lgarron]

For reference, navigator.clipboard.writeText has been supported natively since:

• Firefox 53+ (October 2018)
• Chrome 66+ (April 2018)
• Edge 79+ (January 2020, the first Chromium-based release)
• Safari 13.1+ (March 2020)

https://github.com/lgarron/clipboard-polyfill#compatibility

[aduth]

Going to preemptively close this with the expectation that all of @18f/identity-polyfill will likely become obsolete if/when Internet Explorer is no longer supported.