Five years ago, I had written this extensive Smashing Magazine article detailing multiple different methods for creating simple pie charts, either with clever use of transforms and pseudo-elements, or with SVG stroke-dasharray. In the end, I mentioned creating pie charts with conic gradients, as a future technique. It was actually a writeup of my “The Missing Slice” talk, and an excerpt of my CSS Secrets book, which had just been published.
I was reminded of this article today by someone on Twitter:
I suggested conic gradients, since they are now supported in >87% of users’ browsers, but he needed to support IE11. He suggested using my polyfill from back then, but this is not a very good idea today.
Indeed, unless you really need to display conic gradients, even I would not recommend using the polyfill on a production facing site. It requires -prefix-free, which re-fetches (albeit from cache) your entire CSS and sticks it in a <style> element, with no sourcemaps since those were not a thing back when -prefix-free was written. If you’re already using -prefix-free, the polyfill is great, but if not, it’s way too heavy a dependency.
Pie charts with fallback (modern browsers)
Instead, what I would recommend is graceful degradation, i.e. to use the same color stops, but in a linear gradient.