CanIUse Command Line

By  on  

Every front-end developer should be well acquainted with CanIUse, the website that lets you view browser support for browser features.  When people criticize my blog posts for not detailing browser support for features within the post, I tell them to check CanIUse:  always up to date, unlike posts on any blog.  While I know to use the CanIUse website, I recently found out that Sam Gentle has an accompanying Node.js CanIUse module for looking up browser support.

To install the utility, use a typical npm install command:

# Install globally for less hassle
npm install -g caniuse-cmd

With the caniuse command available, you can look up feature support from the command line:

CanIUse

CanIUse

The display of results is pretty and it provides a listing of different matching features if the lookup is vague.  And because we can get this information in an automated way, you can probably write a decent scraper with cURL and other tools.

Recent Features

  • By
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Steve

    I need to get this hooked up to be an email responder bot! “Hey Steve does ${browserX} support ${featureY}?” => auto respond ;-)

  2. Dominik

    How about just adding canIuse as a search engine to your browser, like so http://caniuse.com/#search=%s?
    Simply typing “c webp” into my browser gives me even nicer formatted results.

  3. Sadly the output is not very useful for automated processing. It would’ve been nice if this could be implemented in a gulp-task, scanning CSS for a defined set of supported browsers, and if a css-declaration wasn’t supported it would throw an error.
    But as your example of ‘transform’ shows, it returns things like JPEG2000, so output parsing is required and tedious. Plus it seems that there is no option to print a simple boolean instead of fancy ticks and crosses.

  4. Definitely an interesting article about this new npm tool, useful for those who like command line better then gui.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!