Even though Internet Explorer 8 is now very old and outdated, there are unfortunately still many corporate users who are still stuck with this old browser. Many things are broken in IE8. One of them is the implementation of Object.defineProperty.

I noticed it when using the polyfill for String.startswith you can find on MDN looks. It looks like this:

if (!String.prototype.startsWith) {
  Object.defineProperty(String.prototype, 'startsWith', {
    enumerable: false,
    configurable: false,
    writable: false,
    value: function(searchString, position) {
      position = position || 0;
      return this.lastIndexOf(searchString, position) === position;
    }
  });
}

While Object.defineProperty is fully supported in IE9, it’s only partially supported in IE8. Internet Explorer 8 only supports defineProperty for DOM objects. If you use it for anything else, IE will complain that there is nothing like Object.defineProperty.

This is especially bad since calling defineProperty will cause and error which will prevent the rest of your JavaScript code to run.

So what can we do about it ?

The first thing I tried was:

        if (defineProperty){
            Object.defineProperty(String.prototype, 'startsWith', {
                enumerable: false,
                configurable: false,
                writable: false,
                value: function (searchString, position) {
                    position = position || 0;
                    return this.indexOf(searchString, position) === position;
                }
            });
        }

Unfortunately I then got an error in the if. So the easiest way to do this turned out to be to try to execute the defineProperty and ignore exceptions:

if (!String.prototype.startsWith) {
    try{ 
        if (defineProperty){
            Object.defineProperty(String.prototype, 'startsWith', {
                enumerable: false,
                configurable: false,
                writable: false,
                value: function (searchString, position) {
                    position = position || 0;
                    return this.indexOf(searchString, position) === position;
                }
            });
        }
    } catch (e) { };
}

After that, you can check again whether startsWith exists and add this function:

if (!String.prototype.startsWith) {
    String.prototype.startsWith = function(searchString, position) {
        position = position || 0;
        return this.indexOf(searchString, position) === position;
    };
}