Cannot assign to read only property '__esModule' - reactjs

Question

When compiling a React and Redux application with Webpack and Babel I get:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot assign to read only property '__esModule' of #<Object>
In some older browsers (<= Chrome 1, Android 4, Safari 5).
This issue seems to stem from redux and react-redux outputting the line exports.__esModule = true; in the lib build but my application using Object.defineProperty instead (because they build loosely and I do not).
Two solutions are:
Building my application in loose mode also.
Importing react-redux/src and redux/src and building it with the same .babelrc as the application (everything is not loose).
As long as they are consistent and both:
Object.defineProperty(exports, "__esModule", {
value: true
});
and exports.__esModule = true; do not co-exist in my output, everything works.
My question is, what is the right solution? Why does this only affect older browsers? And why do they conflict?
Here is a similar question.

Answer 1

Object.defineProperty is broken on some Android 4 stock browser versions and probably other browsers that made use of a buggy implementation in Webkit.
Check this bug report
and and this other one reported to the chromium project.
The good news is you can apply this polyfill to fix the problem.
To make thing easy, you can simply copy and paste that polyfill on a <script> tag before your bundle.
This will fix your issues.

Answer 2

My guess is, you need to install babel-plugin-add-module-exports and in your .babelrc register this plugin:
"plugins": [
"babel-plugin-add-module-exports"
]
For more information visit this website.

Answer 3

In my case, I solved to add babel-register library in entry points.
In webpack.config.js (Webpack 1.x version of configuration)
// As is
entry: {
main: 'index.js'
},
// To be
entry: {
main: ['babel-register', 'index.js']
},

Answer 4

We met this problem on Android 4.0 and currently we cannot cut the support for Android 4.0.
For webpack 1.0, just set loose: true when you are using babel-preset-env.
However for Webpack 2, loose mode can't resolve this problem.
Finally, we found this trick, a little ugly.
// client_patch.js, For Android 4.0
var defineProperty = Object.defineProperty;
Object.defineProperty = function (exports, name) {
if (name === '__esModule') {
exports[name] = true;
return;
}
return defineProperty.apply(this, arguments);
};
And in your webpack config file.
// webpack.config.js
entry: {
main: [
path.resolve(__dirname, 'client_patch.js'),
'index.js'
]
}