In IE11, repeat polyfill seems to fail when uncaught exception is thrown

Bug report

Describe the bug

When testing in IE, I get a white screen when an uncaught exception is thrown rather than the standard error message page or something more user friendly.

To Reproduce

1. yarn create next-app
2. Add a throw new Error('boom') to the top of pages/index.js
3. yarn dev
4. Observe the difference between IE11 and other browsers

Expected behavior

IE11 should have the same behavior for this case as other browsers

Screenshots

System information

• OS: Windows 81
• Browser IE11
• Version of Next.js: 9.3.1

[elliottsj]

Narrowed down the issue some more:

• The error "TypeError: Object doesn't support property or method 'repeat'" occurs on the expression l(a.marker,"^").repeat(h) in the minified source file node_modules/next/dist/compiled/react-error-overlay/index.js.

• The error is only produced when we throw an error at module execution time (rather than at render time).

  e.g. this is ok

  export default () => {
    throw new Error('this is a test');
    return <span>hello world</span>;
  };
  

  but this fails

  throw new Error('this is a test');
  export default () => (<span>hello world</span>);
  

Repro:

$ yarn create next-app my-app
$ cd my-app
$ echo "throw new Error('this is a test'); export default () => (<span>hello world</span>);" > pages/index.js
$ yarn dev

Open the app in IE11, and you’ll see the error:

Observe that String.prototype.repeat is undefined when the l(a.marker,"^").repeat(h) expression is evaluated by replacing it with

(function(){console.log("String.prototype.repeat",String.prototype.repeat);return l(a.marker,"^").repeat(h);})()

e.g.

$ sed -i '' 's/l(a.marker,"^").repeat(h)/(function(){console.log("String.prototype.repeat",String.prototype.repeat);return l(a.marker,"^").repeat(h);})()/g' node_modules/next/dist/compiled/react-error-overlay/index.js
$ yarn dev

So, the issue seems to be that Next.js’s polyfills module is not being loaded prior to executing the pages/index.js module.

[timneutkens]

We can probably include it! Feel free to send a PR.