Chrome 66

[txwizard]

Last night, I successfully built the demonstration application, feeding it through gulp to get a nice bundle.js that I could load into a Web browser from my local Apache Web server. I had it working exactly as expected in both Edge and Chrome. This morning, I modified it to implement the suggestion discussed in Alternative syntax (without decorators/babel transform) #1, at https://github.com/siddharthkp/css-constructor/issues/1, and switched over to Chrome to have a look. To my dismay, I discovered that the page rendered as shown below.

On further investigation, I discovered that Chrome was now at version 66, having updated itself at the start of my new work session. As a further test, I reverted to the original decorated implementation, with the same result. Finally, I displayed the reverted page in Edge, where I found that it rendered as it had last night, as shown below.

Next, I turned my attention to my global browserslist, which happens to be the default list. As I explained and showed at https://github.com/browserslist/browserslist/issues/255, I discovered that the newest Chrome browser listed is 65, leading me to wonder whether that was the source of the rendering behavior change. If so, this suggests a worrisome weakness in the implementation of either browseerlist or something else in the build pipeline.

I don't know enough to answer that question. For now, I suppose that I am stuck with using Edge for testing, until the default list is updated to cover Chrome 66. I am keen to learn if there is a better way to resolve this issue. Hailing frequencies are open.

[txwizard]

Thanks to the prompt response by Andrey Sitnik, @ai, posted in the comment that he appended to https://github.com/browserslist/browserslist/issues/255 when he closed that issue, I have partial clarification that relieves my concern, and suggests a workaround for the outdated browsers list, by updating the data base used by the Can I Use package. Nevertheless, since I don't know enough about the inner workings of the Babel transpiler, the unexpected behavior remains unexplained.

[txwizard]

Today, I discovered that my React installation was two point releases behind. When I updated React, the issue resolved itself, even though the browsers list remained stopped at Chrome 65 as of late 29 April UTC.