I know that as for 2020 the Fetch API can be considered a modern replacement for pretty much everything that was done with XMLHttpRequest. But I wonder if there are still things that can only be done with XMLHttpRequest at this point. Can XMLHttpRequest be completely dropped?
2 Answers
I can imagine couple reasons, why you can use XMLHttpRequest:
First, you don't want to use polyfills, but need to support old browsers: https://caniuse.com/#search=fetch
Second you need something specific from XMLHttpRequest, that fetch can’t do, like upload https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XMLHttpRequest/upload to track upload progress.
In other cases, use fetch.
jQuery depends on XMLHttpRequest (even if the latest version of jQuery does not any more, some previous versions do). Dropping support for it would cause all codebases using jQuery to break so no support can not be dropped.
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