You can't have evolution without dropping ties to the past from time to time. That's about time to drop IE11 to take full advantage of modern Web features.
How much more does the web really need to evolve though? Maybe IE 11 already had all the features that the web platform really needs, and the upgrade treadmill is now being driven by nothing more than our insatiable demand for convenience as spoiled developers. Pity the users who can't keep up with the treadmill.
I agree that for many use cases, IE11 featureset is fine. We jump on the SPA ship too often. I think that static content and server-side rendered apps are often the best option that is for some reason considered out-of-fashion.
However, for those who see a Web browser as an application runtime, IE11 should be out of question. Vue is an application framework, and as such, it should benefit from all the improvements in the Web platform implemented in the modern Web browsers.
These cats make a 5% raise every year I don't think scumbag IT decision makers will ever die they will soon be able to afford advanced AI constructs to house their consciousness. IE11 will never die screenshot this post its only 2021 right now.
Some lab equipment with internal HTTP servers require IE6 to be configured . And they are still sold... It is almost usable in IE11 but you have to disable tons of safeties.
Speaking from previous experience it's likely legacy systems built for even older IE's (8,9,10) were patched to IE11 but not any further due to time (money) involved.
I work writing enterprise software. IE is integrated into our legacy desktop client so we can render new web pieces until everything is updated to be web, then we'll switch to Electron for the client. It's a huge pain to get things like CSS to work right, and the dev tools are super buggy.
This week I've been dealing with an IE11 related problem from a C# app.
The C# app is built using WebBrowser Control[1] which is tightly integrated with the app itself.
WebBrowser only supports IE11 but the webapps that it connects to are increasingly dropping support.
The vendor is reluctant to upgrade their app because the replacement options apparently (?) require extensive refactoring to get the same integration.
IE11 seems to be in a weird limbo. But the fact that it's still technically supported by Microsoft means that conservative software vendors aren't forced to migrate.
They seem to think it's not a drop-in replacement and don't want to rework their code to deal with the changes.
I'm not sure to what extent this is Microsoft making compatibility hard or just a lazy vendor.
It is a completely different API compared to WebBrowser/MSHTL. It is akin to using CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) for the most part. This can require rewriting pretty much everything that interacts with the browser currently as well as dealing with a completely different threading and event model in the new APIs (both WebView2 and WebKit/CEF/etc)
Some large companies put installation restrictions on third-party software for security reasons, and find that throwing money at Microsoft for an enterprise support contract is cheaper than re-engineering their ancient internal software to work on something other than IE.
And because these are also the types of giant companies that tend to shit money, there are plenty of mid-sized B2B saas companies willing to bend over backwards to win a contract and earn their droppings.
So I'm sure there are a good few developers forced to support IE11 by a bad contract who will be bummed by this news.
But full deprecation has to happen eventually, and it will only help the effort to have engineers telling middle management "the project will take twice as long because we have to support IE11".
This used to be the case, but not anymore. The new Edge browser has IE mode which makes the browser behave like IE 11. Only those using Windows XP and Vista won't be able to use the new Edge browser, but they have bigger issues, like not getting any security updates.
I've heard that the people who use IE11 are the ones who don't have a choice, because maybe they are using a computer at a library, or some kind of accessibility-related device. Does anyone on HN know of solid data to back this claim? This screenreader[1] survey for example says 11% of their users use IE11, though that is from 2019.
All Windows screen readers with any significant user base have supported Chromium and Firefox for a while now. The old EdgeHTML engine didn't work so well with third-party Windows screen readers, so some blind users may have held onto IE 11 because of that. But any Windows screen reader that works with Chrome also works with the Chromium-based Edge. And note that the WebAIM survey you released was from before the Chromium-based Edge started being pushed to the broader Windows user base.
Bottom line: Web developers should not feel obligated to keep supporting IE 11 for the sake of screen reader users.
People using IE 11 “because they have to” is a hard thing to quantify without some sort of survey.
I say this because even though your anecdote rings true, I’ve seen many people in offices use IE 11 purely out of ignorance and comfort reasons rather than because they were forced. They had Edge, Firefox installed but stuck with IE because no one told them to stop using it.
We may be underestimating the portion of “if it ain’t broke why fix it” crowd are using IE 11 but it’s hard to say with statistical data alone.
Anyway, regardless of how it’s sliced, it’s low enough now for libraries to start dropping.
We build websites for organisations in the UK who do a lot of work with the NHS, and we regularly still see ~10% visits from IE11 in Google Analytics. Organisations that don’t work with the NHS consistently show < 2%, so although I don’t have conclusive proof I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on for us.
I wonder how much of a sampling bias there is. It's plausible to me that users of non-IE11 browsers are more likely to be using ad/tracking blockers which block Google Analytics. That could skew the relative population of "users who ran Google Analytics" towards more IE11 users.
Were you able to use other sources than Google Analytics to look at the browser population? I imagine working with the NHS that things like HTTP access logs are harder to wrangle (if they exist at all)
For clarity, we don't build websites for NHS bodies, we build sites for some external organisations that work with the NHS, so logs would be relatively easy if it felt worth it. GA is my only source, but my hunch is that use of blockers is pretty consistent across clients whose visitors are mostly from businesses or institutions, and I see this differential across those audiences. Having spoken to people who work in the NHS Digital team there are definitely pockets of IE use, although it's been getting better - the shift sped up quite a bit after the Wannacry attack.
We have basic first party analytics of the NHS users of our software (mainly just browser versions actually), and it's probably a little over half of them are using IE11 still. My impression from talking to some of them is that most of them now have both Chrome and IE11 available on their machines, and it's just which one they're using. I'm sure that's uniform everywhere though.
Biggest reason is corporate/government IT that's been slow to upgrade, possibly because they have intranet sites that don't support newer browsers. Accessibility is available (and better) in modern browsers.
I'm counting 0.9% under our users (which is of course a biased group, but at least near being representative for region, gender, age and education) since 2020-01-01, but only 0.2% since 2021-01-01. So it seems be dropping quite steadily.
Edit: a few of the IE11 user agent strings even mention Windows NT 6.1, and no x64 or WOW/Win64, so I guess they're still running 32 bit Windows 7.
My companies thin client has to support IE11 because we run on lots of lock down industrial control systems that run Windows 7 or Windows 10 IoT and cannot have any other browser installed.
Look, something I’m finally qualified to answer! At my previous job our customers were a representative sample of the Fortune 500 and about 40% of our users (their employees) were on IE11 just a few months ago. There were some very well known companies that used IE11 exclusively. It’s very quickly changing and this might be the year when it finally goes away, but it’s still alive and well in the corporate world.
IE11: yes. IE11 "integrated into anything you were using IE11 for": no. MS is working hard to make sure that it fulfills its contractual obligation with respect to IE11's EOL, but it's at the same time removing it from everywhere it was traditionally integrated so that it can die a proper death. It'll be officially supported for as long as Windows 10 is a thing, but they're going to make it as useless as possible outside of "just being an old browser that's incompatible with today's web".
1) Sometimes companies go out of business or stop supporting\updating things. If you build critical processes around these outdated tools, it can be very difficult to change.
2) Users aren't savvy enough to know when to use Chrome, Firefox or IE. Some aren't even savvy enough to call things the correct names (looking at you Mozzarella Foxfire). So they just settle on on a lowest common denominator.
Easy reason: why spend money (and reduce quarterly profit) if the software is still supported by the vendor for another two years? Let it be the problem of the CTO of two years from now.
In two years the C-level/VP responsible has long since taken the golden parachute and his successor is stuck with the bill.
Also, any sort of internal IT stuff is exclusively seen as a cost center by the MBA bean counters. Stuff like employees leaving due to outdated IT isn't something quantifiable in impact unless you have entire departments walking away at once.
I still have IE installed so that I can run ONE god-forsaken enterprise application known as Oracle EBS (Enterprise Business Suite). For everything else I use Chrome.
Oracle EBS uses NPAPI (AKA Java Plugins AKA Java Applets). Chrome dropped support for NPAPI years ago, and since then we've been using IE to whenever we need to use Oracle EBS.
I understand that the latest version of Oracle EBS might now support the cutting-edge technology of Java Web Start to continue to deliver their 1990's era grey-blah UI's with shitty layout. I don't even care to ask about upgrades.
Negotiating with the bean-counter types that have enabled Oracle to put it's slimy tentacles into every critical area of the business is a dreadful, thankless task. I expect it will keep running, at its current version, long after I leave or retire. At some point, I expect employees will need to spin up VM's to open IE to use the f-ing thing-- perhaps they can set it up in their "forever" dream OS, Windows NT with IE4?
That's actually probably the best approach: make some Citrix hosts running IE11 and let people use those when they actually need to touch the legacy software. Then you can upgrade everything else.
It sounds like you (or your enterprise) has chosen not to upgrade you applications. That's fine. But it's hardly fair to blame the vendor for your choice of not upgrading.
I agree it's not entirely fair, but yes, the bulk of the blame has to go to the corporate derps that keep it running and love it.
But even if we could use the "latest version" a quick google image search for "Oracle EBS screenshots" shows that UI-wise, not much has changed. Maybe they got rid of the insipid flash-light icon? I didn't want to get too stressed by looking closely.
I used to work in IT at a Fortune 100 manufacturing company. IE versions hung around for a long time because there was a lot of software that was built with only IE in mind and only received the bare minimum of support.
In some cases this was off the shelf software from vendors who had gone out of business. In other cases it was software built in house that would require a complete rewrite to modernize.
All of this software was tightly integrated into processes that were critical for the company to operate. While the cost of replacing the old software was a consideration, the biggest concern was the potential disruption to operations.
If a software change reduced productivity or even worse caused work to stop entirely, it meant millions in financial impact.
Huh, my last company was very successful in the enterprise space, selling to tonnes of Fortune 500 companies and government organizations, and IE11 was <2% of users for us. We were preparing to deprecate support for it around the time I left.
The biggest issue with newer browsers is actually probably the feature cycle. Every couple months browsers introduce at least one horrible feature I need to update our policies to disable.
I generally do the normal Firefox release and just put up with it, but I can understand why larger organizations might be frustrated with keeping modern browsers secure. They're worried about info leaks while browser vendors are interested in figuring out how to hook websites up to USB devices and VR headsets, and figuring out how to ad new advertising experiences to the new tab page.
Yes, considering the surface area they are relatively secure. But the surface area is absolutely massive and I have no doubt in my mind that there are multiple full remote code execution zero-days in all major browsers.
Treating security as an absolute is rarely useful because very few things are completely secure. No browser will be completely secure for the foreseeable future.
We're writing apps for mostly local government users, almost all of who use IE11 because it continues to have Java Applet support.
Some of these Applet-based things have been migrated to modern web, but many still haven't, since it is almost 15+ years of software development now needing to be re-written.
There have been discussions about Edge's "IE Mode" but unfortunately that only applies to domain joined machines, and they have a BYOD policy.
Can you not have the employees join the domain, like how some companies let you enroll in Exchange on a personal phone in exchange for allowing device administration/remote wipe?
As with a phone, if it bothers the employees (it'd certainly bother me) have them buy a laptop for work only.
I think you mean, have the employer buy that laptop/phone for them. The employer provides an, imo, unreasonable ask, then they should have to provide the alternative.
Basically. I work in the B2B online education space and many large businesses use IE11 on hardware that supports other browsers just fine. Part of it is that they use decades-old intranets that only support IE officially so they were stuck. We noticed since around early pre-pandemic 2020 (and accelerated by the pandemic), that IE users are becoming Chrome and Chromium Edge users. Our pet theory is that the Microsoft EoL pushed IT departments to just make the jump and then WFH pushed many to new hardware where they might have a choice. Also our product is far worse in IE as Trident's JS Engine truly is horrific and our whole site is much faster in Chrome. We saw IE use drop to under 10% now from ~35% around two and a half years ago.
IE11 is over 10% on the sites I build. Even when IE11 becomes only .5% of my users, I will support it.
I work in healthcare, so I don't get to make lazydev excuses about time constraints and "edge cases." The people still using IE are the people who need my web sites the most.
> I work in healthcare, so I don't get to make lazydev excuses about time constraints and "edge cases."
If I were to read this statement uncharitably, I would conclude that there is plenty of money in healthcare to be wasted on supporting outdated technology, adding to the already outrageous costs of healthcare. Furthermore, if you're not lazy, you're probably creating unnecessary work.
> The people still using IE are the people who need my web sites the most.
From a holistic welfare perspective, giving these people a modern web browser would be better than maintaining their status quo.
I work in healthcare as well and the health IT landscape is horrifying. Hospitals not hiring software engineers is part of the reason you end up with thirty-person implementation teams from firms like Epic and GE trying to config their way out integration hell. Trying to integrate a new product via HL7 is a special hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. It's the only standard I've worked with where nobody even attempts to follow the spec, and everyone else is just expected to conform to whatever arbitrary changes the hospital made (both intentionally, and accidentally). The vast majority of IT management is completely non-technical, especially - paradoxically - at larger institutions. At small community places the IT director is typically the person who was setting up the doctors' computers ten years prior. At huge practices it's someone with an MHA or who hasn't done anything remotely technical since the 90's.
I love working in healthcare but the hospital side is atrocious in my experience.
I know there is a CURRENT Microsoft product (for administration) that requires IE11. I do not remember what it is but I was really surprised when our Microsoft guru (he is really good) showed it to me and was not happy either.
I do some server work for a small company that sells a downloadable product whose target audience is ordinary people, probably not too technologically sophisticated when it comes to computers.
It is unlikely someone would purchase from anywhere than their home Windows PC, and I don't think many are using accessibility-related devices (the site was using a third party component that turned out to be terrible for accessibility, and it was years before anyone complained about it (and we then replaced it with one that was accessible)).
I just took a look at the logs for the past 12 months. Here are the relative numbers of successful orders by browser, normalized to Firefox on Windows 10 = 100.
On Windows 10: Chrome 602, IE11 116, Firefox 100, Edge 94.
On Windows 8: Chrome 44, Firefox 16, IE11 14, IE10 4.
On Windows 7: Chrome 76, Firefox 40, IE11 30, IE9 2.
That's the thing, the edge cases are a long tail of accessibility challenges, and most of today's developers are OK with just telling that 1% or 5% tail to pound sand.
Me personally, I want my sites to be accessible from libraries, that old device in the closet you're attached to, survival centers and shelters, old kiosks stuck in the corner of a community space somewhere, and all other kinds of scenarios I haven't even imagined, but I don't want to leave those users out in the cold.
Talking about vue, I'm really waiting for Vuetify to support Vue3. Especially with typescript I feel like the current ways to describe fragments are a bit half-assed.
I find it amusing that people complain about React not being stable enough, and yet it still supports IE9 as Angular and Vue both look to remove IE11 support.
This is obviously great overall, developing for IE is a pain. One weird anecdote though, I have an old laptop that has very little memory, running Windows 10. And I swear, IE11 works better than Chrome and Edge for websites that support it. Chromium seriously seems to crash my computer because of some memory issue. Any idea why this happens (regarding IE performing better)?
I only know this because I maintain a CSS framework that supports IE11, so I have to use IE quite a bit.
I used to have a similar issue on my laptop. IE was the only browser capable of viewing YouTube videos at 1080p without stutter. Firefox would stutter, as would Chrome and Chromium Edge.
I've since given the laptop a clear out, reinstalling Windows 10 and installing Kubuntu as well. The issue has now gone away. Firefox now copes fine from either OS.
Heh, so we really ought to move from MSHTML... We're embedding a web browser control in our app for flexibility in adapting the GIS documentation system to varying needs depending on customer. Some customers document more details on electricity meters than others, some tie them to other billing systems on the backend than others. Etc...
But it's actually working out great and we can as a bonus update these parts of the desktop app without even shutting it down. Our app has a web API that the scripts interact with.
The obvious downside is that it's using IE 11. WebView2 exists though which uses Microsoft's Chromium fork, but the control is only now reaching production quality. Like mere months ago. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
But it'll probably be what we eventually do especially as it supports Windows 7 which is quite something for emerging technology from Microsoft. We need this because surprisingly many customers still have Windows Server 2012 installs here and there. Sounds insane to run 10 year old servers for security reasons but the amazing thing is that Microsoft will support these to late 2023.
For now we're in our most advanced scripts using Bootstrap Vue + VueJS 2 + a few polyfills and it's amazed me how seamless it actually is in developing on Chromium 90 and everything just keeps working and looking almost identical on IE 11. Interaction, model bindings, templating, everything. I totally did NOT expect this. I expected... "Support". I mean... This is some achievement. There's been the occasional, minor stumbling block every three months or so but still...
WebView2 is basically CEF for the most part though. I would love for Trident or EdgeHTML to be released as open source honestly. I'm sure there are complicated licensing issues that would prevent this though. I built and helped maintain a relatively complicated application that interacts via the COM interfaces of MSHTML (and the crazy print template stuff) which basically has to be scrapped eventually.
That's 87.86% of what users are using (per Wikimedia's stats). To support the 1.76% of IE users, it will require a disproportionate amount of work that could negatively impact other development that benefits many more people.
That's the reality: Development time is a zero-sum game. If you do this you aren't doing this other thing, and in this case we're talking about under 2% that likely should be discouraged from using it.
PS - And this coming from someone whose uses are primarily on IE11 still (see my other post in the thread). Just because I personally benefit from IE11 staying around a few more years, doesn't mean the entire web should bend to that. IE11 must die, we just cannot turn on a needle, and when Edge dropped support for Java Applets/Flash it forced tons of organizations into IE11 for many more years than they would have wanted.
Code to standards and expect the browsers to implement those standards reasonably.
Avoid the bleeding edge to support those held back at LTS versions of common browsers, or if you use new tricks make sure they don't make things unusable on older-but-LTS browsers. Whether you consider IE11 an LTS browser or not is a matter for you to decide (yes, as it will be getting security updates for some time still, or no as it is seven years old, not getting any feature/support updates, and support for it is deprecated by even its own manufacture's apps).
Support accessibility by not using fancy things for the sake of it, and if you do something fancy make at least a little effort to have things degrade gracefully for those with accessibility issues. A lot of sites/apps skip this step, but shouldn't.
I've been in front-end dev for about 15 years and I don't remember that. I remember developing web applications to work in browsers that led to a significant number of our business' conversions, and practicing progressive enhancement in general.
Yeah, somewhere in the late 2010s we seem to have lost interest in the idea of graceful degradation.
It's one thing for a website to look a bit ugly and actions to require a few more clicks when accessed with an outdated browser. It's a completely different thing when you're left staring at a blank screen. The latter is what happens when an entire frontend framework decides that they'd rather give you no experience than a degraded experience because they don't want to maintain polyfills anymore.
I do sympathize with the hate for IE, having suffered it for long enough. But once we've decided that IE users don't deserve anything, who's next? How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice.
First they came for IE, and I did not speak out ... you know how the poem ends.
I think you have a valid point. However, I'd like to offer a factual correction on this part:
> How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader?
As far as I know, this was only ever an issue on Windows, and it's not anymore. IMO, the best third-party screen reader for Windows is NVDA [1], and it's free and open-source. Even a user stuck on Windows XP or Vista can get a version of NVDA from 2017 that works well with Chromium (assuming one can get a Chromium-based browser that runs on those old versions of Windows). On all other platforms, the screen reader is built into the platform itself, and updated along with it. Windows itself has had Narrator built in for a long time now, and Narrator in Windows 10 is getting good (disclosure: I was on the Narrator team at Microsoft for 3 years), but there are still valid reasons to use a third-party screen reader on Windows.
You are right, but we must remember that poor people in poor regions are disproportionately more likely to be stuck on very old hardware. According to StatCounter, 5.7% of PC users in Africa are still on XP or Vista, compared to only 0.6% in North America. That's almost 10 times as much.
Rallying against older browsers was once supposed to be a good fight against evil monopolists. Now it's about kicking away the ladder from people who are already the poorest and most powerless in the world, making them even less able to take advantage of the latest information and communication tools. And we're not even realizing what we're doing because we're so used to the first world fast upgrade cycle.
> How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader?
None of these are Internet Explorer, the problem in question. Chrome and its Play Store dependencies are backwards compatible to much older phones. Android browsers even years ago had better web platform support than IE11.
I fully sympathize and believe that web sites should be as compatible as possible. It's the web apps that fall apart once you take away modern functionality.
> In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice.
This really depends on how much their actual lives depend on being able to use the web. If they live in poverty and/or third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the web? What part of their life depends on what site exactly? Sure, communication is relevant, but we're already saying they have smart phones and thus data connections, email, and whatever native chat apps.
I'm not saying we should leave them behind technologically or that they don't matter or shouldn't have access to more information or knowledge, I'm just simply being practical with what is likely the real impact to their life.
In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content. The web already excels at that. Servers cache. Browsers cache. We don't need Vue to render a blog or article. Please leave such tech for SPAs and "apps" rather than sites or pages.
> If they live in poverty and/or third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the web?
It won't affect their daily lives directly, but being able to access the knowledge scattered around the web is very important to human development in general.
What I wrote above is a kind of slippery slope argument, but it's a slope that I'm sure we're sliding down very quickly. You can't even read a technical blog these days without loading a whole SPA framework. If we keep going down this path, it will legitimately begin to impact the ability of people with older devices to access any information at all apart from those delivered through a handful of walled garden apps.
> In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content.
More like Chrome is the Web Standard now. Generally stuff that runs in chrome, runs fine in Firefox and Edge, Safari can be a little weird sometimes but overall it's way easier these days.
There are some fine differences. Google likes to blur the line between actual Web standards (which have consensus via W3C or WHATWG), Chrome's prototypes that may inform future standards, and self-serving Google APIs that only have "Web" in their name.
Sometimes it's just Google releasing whatever they want, use it on google.com and youtube.com while serving slower/buggier fallbacks to others, so other vendors have no choice but to implement Google's non-standard invention to avoid looking broken.
Google gets away with this a lot, because there are also many actual standards that Safari is ignoring. Without following dozens of mailing lists and bug trackers it's hard to tell what Google is pushing for themselves (e.g. AMP was a motivation for many "standards" proposals), and where others are dragging their feet.
I think the point seen here is really that if the standards org doesn't impact the browsers and the browser in question has greater than 60% market share then that browser is the standards org and the W3C doesn't matter. Who is going to harm Google? How would the W3C enforce their standards? If most of your users are on Chrome and Chrome sets the feature set rather than the W3C, why wouldn't you just build to Chrome?
The W3C gave up on many web standards like HTML and their process is just rubber stamping whatever WHATWG decides are standards and WHATWG seems to just rubber stamp whatever Google wants (more often than not).
Browser vendors have always been driving the standards. W3C is correct to call their docs "recommendations".
There was a brief nice moment in history when WebKit, Gecko, Trident, and Presto each had enough market share that all the vendors had to cooperate.
Nowadays Trident and Presto are dead. Gecko is a great engine, but doesn't have enough market share to veto anything. So Blink can ship anything and claim it's supported "everywhere except Safari".
That was when we had no choice but to force in hacks to make things work on browsers that didn't quite follow the same standards. You ended up only being able to use the lowest common denominator feature set or using many hacks & polyfills.
Better is to stick with standards and make the browser makers implement them properly. Of course things aren't perfect still (Safari has a reputation for being slow on the uptake so you can't use the latest & greatest if you need to support those users, and it is best to avoid the bleeding edge anyway (at least sticking as far back as the oldest LTS release of common browsers)).
Yup, and I don't want to go back to resorting to hacks to piles of hacks to support them all. It's good that most modern browsers just work for the most part these days.
I am working on a few different apps right now and none of them are targeting IE. It's a huge time suck and just not worth doing at the expensive of improving other parts of the application.
The problem is that IE chains your feet compared to every other single browser. CSS Vars? Nope! JS performance that is 1/50th that of Chrome on the same platform? Yep! Weird-ass rendering choices that make zero sense compared to the W3C standards? MS has you!
Basically, IE11 didn't change with the web so it's really out there now. You can develop for Firefox and all the Webkit/Blink offshoots just fine, but IE holds you up.
The operative word here is “pages”. Developers of statics sites should try to support everything. For full-featured web apps on a budget, the challenges of cross compatibility can be insurmountable.
Not sure what you mean. This is way less of a problem as it was even 5 years ago. Even a modern tool like Babel, which was pretty much mandatory in webdev build is becoming less important given the pace at which browsers standardise specs nowadays.
I started using the web in 1994, and no, I don't ever remember a time when people designed web pages to work on any browser.
In the mid-90s, the internet was filled with pages that had "best viewed with Netscape Navigator" or "best viewed with Internet Explorer" icons. Twenty-five years later that mentality hasn't changed, and I don't think it ever will. It costs too much to target more than one or two browsers.
I use IE6 as a sort of litmus test for websites. If a site works in IE6, it's more likely to work on every browser imaginable. Those people creating sites designed to work in the latest browser version only scare me to death.
The landscape has changed. Most typical, everyday user have browsers that update themselves to the latest version. Supporting ancient technology (like IE6) doesn't provide a benefit that really justifies the enormous amount of work required. Just let the old browsers die already.
Flexbox and block-scoped variables aren’t really that scary. Honestly less scary than the alternatives, nested tables and global variables. Sometimes it’s okay to have nice things.
If you mean that IE6 represents some common set of baseline features that all other browsers will support this is absolutely 100% false.
IE6 has tons of quirks and nonstandard features, and sites that are truly written specifically for IE6 and target its features (e.g. activex) and numerous css bugs will simply not work or display correctly in any other browsers at all.
Newer versions of IE have to have two separate rendering modes. One of these, "quirks mode," is a non-standard mode that specifically emulates the broken IE6 functionality, because this is the only way to correctly display pages designed for IE6 in a modern browser.
On the other hand, people writing new sites in 2021 that support IE are people who are very concerned with compatibility who are being very careful and using zillions of LOC of pollyfills to ensure the sites work in IE. The sites these people create will work in other browsers not because of any property of IE6, but because the people making them also put a lot of work into ensuring they are compatible with other browsers, and dropping support for IE would save a lot of work without reducing compatibility with other browsers.
If a website still works in IE6 then there are some serious problems with the site's security implementation. IE6 doesn't support TLS 1.2 or 1.3, it's vulnerable to POODLE, RC4 and FREAK attacks, and there's no ECC compatibility on any OS.
If a site loads in IE6 stay the hell away from it.
I'm not even joking when I say this, for some companies, it would literally be cheaper to buy your IE users a new computer. Obviously, for enterprise customers, who are likely to be the majority of IE 11 users, you can't necessarily do that (though think about if you can).
You could have some kind of wrapper that installs legacy web sites as a separate app and starts a locked down embedded IE with a set of security policies.
From what I have seen supporting one browser is easier and maybe more sane for the IT department. I've seen chrome standard but certain employees get IE 7,8,9,10,11 and they use it for everything.
Users are dumb thats why. We literally have to make 4-5 shortcuts with iexpore.exe website.net and another one with chrome.exe website2.net and rename them accordingly. Some vendors have their web app work only with firefox and an old version like 20+ /:.
Not to upset any dev but really trying to put some fancy stuff and a bunch of frameworks in a piece of software that does one thing and has to work 24/7 is really a bad ideea.
There's good reasons why these exist, and it's got zero to do with dev competence.
In 2005 your employer asks for internal app, says you've got to use kendo or some such UI framework. Or maybe they want an autocomplete drop-down and you picked one that in the future will turn out to be not standards compliant. Or you were asked to use the stylesheet from another project to get them to look the same and that's not compliant. But you don't even know, as it only has to work on IE8 as that's all that's available to your users. You make it. It works fine.
Fast forward to 2015, no-ones touched the app in 10 years, the SVN server the code was on has been thrown away, and it's either rewrite the whole thing or force everyone to keep on using IE8.
That's what generally happened, not dev incompetence.
>Users are dumb thats why. We literally have to make 4-5 shortcuts with iexpore.exe website.net and another one with chrome.exe website2.net and rename them accordingly.
Edge in Enterprise Mode solves this as you provide edge with a list of sites that need IE, then Edge will automatically open those sites in IE Tab (or in previous versions of Edge, redirect the user automatically to IE)
No joke. If you think about the computers that would need replacement, say purchased in 2010, could literally be replaced with some microcomputer that fully wipes and resets itself between logins that runs some desktop linux. These things are capable of driving a screen, keyboard and mouse and can connect to the internet - we've boiled down what a computer is to a re-settable science at this point - there's no need for a big ass tower with fans in it anymore.
Its not the computer. WE have a application that only runs on IE11. Our computers are windows 10. We use edge/chrome for everything else but 1 application still runs on IE11.
SAP, one of the largest ERP vendors, is dropping IE support this year for most of their products including legacy ones.[0] And according to SAP, "91% of Forbes Global 2000" are SAP customers.[1] So we can expect enterprises moving to "modern browsers" this year if not done already.
I do create B2B apps. Last time I had to support IE11 was 6 years ago.
The difference between a developer I would employ and a developer I would not employ boils down to throw away junk like this. there are plenty of people commenting on here from a Grown Up point of view. maybe read through some of that stuff.
I still use IE as my default browser (and Firefox as a fallback), for the following reasons:
– The font rendering works better for my eyesight.
– Killer feature: Ctrl+N/K clones the browser window/tab including the history. I.e. you can effectively fork the history. EDIT: And, equally important, opening a link in a new tab/window also preserves (clones) the history.
– Certain keyboard operations have better usability than on other browsers.
– The title bar + address/tab bar height height is smallest among all browsers (after some configuration).
I’m slowly getting used to the inevitability of migrating to Firefox. The font rendering and especially the clone-by-keyboard feature are the hardest part though. (And the fact that Firefox doesn’t allow yellow as a search highlight color.)
Then actually it might not help you too much... it's really a replacement font rendering engine for Windows (initially Windows GDI rendering and now they're adding in support for DirectWrite). It uses FreeType with various parameters to make the font rendering look more like macOS (in a nutshell: macOS doesn't use aggressive hinting to force the font shapes into the pixel grid, which makes it blurrier but more accurate on low-resolution screens; Windows does, and so it looks sharper on low-resolution screens).
However while looking around at a bug report to get MacType to work in Firefox [0] I came across a setting in Firefox's about:config [1] that can change the font rendering and that might help you out. Not sure about the history forking thing but there may be some Firefox extension to help with that.
Yes, but (a) there’s too much software I still use that isn’t hi-DPI capable, and (b) I use a 1920x1200 display so would lose 10% vertical height, which is quite significant.
Fwiw Firefox's "duplicate tab" feature similarly clones history. It only exists for tabs though, not entire windows. Right-click the tab, it's in the context menu.
To be fair, on IE it doesn't clone the entire window, just the current tab into a new window. Still, that's my main use case, and AFAICT it's not possible in Firefox by keyboard or even with a single mouse action.
Thanks. Now that I looked into it again, the issue I have is not just the Duplicate Tab feature, but that opening a link in a new tab or window clears the history of that new tab/window instead of cloning the history of the source tab. that means that you can't quickly open a couple of links into new tabs/windows, with each of them preserving the current history. I don't think there's a fix for that.
There's a mouse shortcut for Duplicate Tab in Firefox: middle-click the Reload button! It blew my mind when I read about it in some random thread a couple of years ago.
If you middle-click the refresh button in chrome it clones the current tab with history. You can also middle click the back button to clone the previous page in a new tab with history preserved.
Thanks. The main problem is that there doesn't seem to be a way to access it by keyboard. Secondly, it's also not possible to convert a tab to a separate window by keyboard. So what is a single keypress on IE becomes a cumbersome operation.
Some UI features on Firefox can be customized using userChrome.css [1]. I bet you can make title bar as small as you like and change search highlight color. For font rendering you could create a bug report.
Regarding the search highlight color, Firefox has the (mis)feature that if the highlight background color is too close to the text background color (which is the case for yellow vs. white background), then it inverts the search highlight text and background color, i.e. you get yellow text on black background for the highlight, instead of black text on yellow background. The rationale is accessiblity, i.e. requiring a minimum contrast for the highlight background against the normal background. But for me that behavior is anti-accessibility, and it can't be turned off. The issue has been raised since the behavior was introduced in 2009, but the maintainers don't want to change it. The corlor inversion implementation also seems to be pretty deep in the stack, and tied to the HTML <mark> tag.
Regarding font rendering, there have been multiple issue reports over the years, although most users complain that Firefox doesn't render text like Chrome, which I tend to find even worse than Firefox. ;)
It's more like it is so weird compared to everything else. CSS Flex makes some strange choices, CSS Grid isn't, Some layout choices ignore W3C stuff, the JS engine is slower than everything by a huge amount, it's just crap compared to every other browser.
Edit: Oh and if you have a large webapp, the F12 developer tools are just a crashfest and are unusable so you can't even debug what IE is doing weirdly.
That's literally what most folks have been waiting for for years, I'm pretty sure most web devs are keenly aware of this. However, do note that there is technically also still an IE7 version floating around due to Windows Embedded Compact 2013 not having reached EOL yet (its EOL date is 10/10/2023).
I'm currently building a website that uses Vue 3 in parts, as well as other features that don't work (well) in IE11 such as CSS Grid.
Would you recommend only displaying an error screen for any users who try to view the site using Internet Explorer or another old browser? Or should I let those browsers try to display what they can, and maybe also a warning message?
My two cents is it depends on the nature of the lack of functionality, is this just about not displaying information or is this going to cause data corruption (ie, if validation checks or expected ajax calls are not being made), if it's just the display of things I would probably go with a warning message.
Keep in mind that the code has to compile for checks to work. Eg a ‘let’ in the same script block will break the isIE check too and it’s easy to miss that someone broke it. How often does the ie11 code get tested on ie11..
Best to keep the IE 11 warning code in a separate (nomodule?) script file
My B2B app is completely broken in IE. I just let it stay that way. No warnings. Tech support knows to tell customers to use Firefox, Chrome, or Safari if they run into issues. It's such a rare occurrence that it is not worth the effort to detect an ancient browser and render a warning.
IE11 is supposedly at 1% market share. However, Vue market share is 0.77% of all websites (which is actually huge) Therefore, even for those 1% users of IE11, that's still like 1 of the hundred pages they'll visit in a day. And because so many other frameworks already killed IE11, it's not like those 1% users are going to complain too much more than they would already be, oh shit now 2 of the 100 pages I visit per day are blank!
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadCommendable, too, that they are working to backport some v3 features to the v2 codebase.
IE11 is frozen in time. and won't support any newer tech, think about web components, HTTP 3 etc.
However, for those who see a Web browser as an application runtime, IE11 should be out of question. Vue is an application framework, and as such, it should benefit from all the improvements in the Web platform implemented in the modern Web browsers.
We have so little traffic from it now, and the browser renders far slower than Edge / Chrome. Habits are hard to kick in enterprise.
The C# app is built using WebBrowser Control[1] which is tightly integrated with the app itself. WebBrowser only supports IE11 but the webapps that it connects to are increasingly dropping support.
The vendor is reluctant to upgrade their app because the replacement options apparently (?) require extensive refactoring to get the same integration.
IE11 seems to be in a weird limbo. But the fact that it's still technically supported by Microsoft means that conservative software vendors aren't forced to migrate.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/con...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2
They seem to think it's not a drop-in replacement and don't want to rework their code to deal with the changes. I'm not sure to what extent this is Microsoft making compatibility hard or just a lazy vendor.
Some large companies put installation restrictions on third-party software for security reasons, and find that throwing money at Microsoft for an enterprise support contract is cheaper than re-engineering their ancient internal software to work on something other than IE.
And because these are also the types of giant companies that tend to shit money, there are plenty of mid-sized B2B saas companies willing to bend over backwards to win a contract and earn their droppings.
So I'm sure there are a good few developers forced to support IE11 by a bad contract who will be bummed by this news.
But full deprecation has to happen eventually, and it will only help the effort to have engineers telling middle management "the project will take twice as long because we have to support IE11".
Yeah, it's practically gone from the public web. But when you look at business stuff, there is a lot more IE out there still than people realize.
- Easily less than 1% market share
- IE11 is side by side packaged with some version of Edge in almost every case
This seems reasonable.
[1] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#browsers
Bottom line: Web developers should not feel obligated to keep supporting IE 11 for the sake of screen reader users.
I say this because even though your anecdote rings true, I’ve seen many people in offices use IE 11 purely out of ignorance and comfort reasons rather than because they were forced. They had Edge, Firefox installed but stuck with IE because no one told them to stop using it.
We may be underestimating the portion of “if it ain’t broke why fix it” crowd are using IE 11 but it’s hard to say with statistical data alone.
Anyway, regardless of how it’s sliced, it’s low enough now for libraries to start dropping.
Were you able to use other sources than Google Analytics to look at the browser population? I imagine working with the NHS that things like HTTP access logs are harder to wrangle (if they exist at all)
Edit: a few of the IE11 user agent strings even mention Windows NT 6.1, and no x64 or WOW/Win64, so I guess they're still running 32 bit Windows 7.
So this reflects my experience as well.
Microsoft is offering IE11 extended support until at least 2025, so I wouldn't bet on that.
Granted, this is the same codebase that has an element on their login page named "acceptCredintials", so... that's the starting point.
Why has it taken so long for corp America to move off of IE? There are so many other better alternatives.
I still sometimes have flashbacks of having to design around and support IE6. /shudder
1) Sometimes companies go out of business or stop supporting\updating things. If you build critical processes around these outdated tools, it can be very difficult to change.
2) Users aren't savvy enough to know when to use Chrome, Firefox or IE. Some aren't even savvy enough to call things the correct names (looking at you Mozzarella Foxfire). So they just settle on on a lowest common denominator.
In two years the C-level/VP responsible has long since taken the golden parachute and his successor is stuck with the bill.
Also, any sort of internal IT stuff is exclusively seen as a cost center by the MBA bean counters. Stuff like employees leaving due to outdated IT isn't something quantifiable in impact unless you have entire departments walking away at once.
Oracle EBS uses NPAPI (AKA Java Plugins AKA Java Applets). Chrome dropped support for NPAPI years ago, and since then we've been using IE to whenever we need to use Oracle EBS.
I understand that the latest version of Oracle EBS might now support the cutting-edge technology of Java Web Start to continue to deliver their 1990's era grey-blah UI's with shitty layout. I don't even care to ask about upgrades.
Negotiating with the bean-counter types that have enabled Oracle to put it's slimy tentacles into every critical area of the business is a dreadful, thankless task. I expect it will keep running, at its current version, long after I leave or retire. At some point, I expect employees will need to spin up VM's to open IE to use the f-ing thing-- perhaps they can set it up in their "forever" dream OS, Windows NT with IE4?
But even if we could use the "latest version" a quick google image search for "Oracle EBS screenshots" shows that UI-wise, not much has changed. Maybe they got rid of the insipid flash-light icon? I didn't want to get too stressed by looking closely.
In some cases this was off the shelf software from vendors who had gone out of business. In other cases it was software built in house that would require a complete rewrite to modernize.
All of this software was tightly integrated into processes that were critical for the company to operate. While the cost of replacing the old software was a consideration, the biggest concern was the potential disruption to operations.
If a software change reduced productivity or even worse caused work to stop entirely, it meant millions in financial impact.
It might not be IE6 stable, but better than running nightly.
Treating security as an absolute is rarely useful because very few things are completely secure. No browser will be completely secure for the foreseeable future.
Some of these Applet-based things have been migrated to modern web, but many still haven't, since it is almost 15+ years of software development now needing to be re-written.
There have been discussions about Edge's "IE Mode" but unfortunately that only applies to domain joined machines, and they have a BYOD policy.
As with a phone, if it bothers the employees (it'd certainly bother me) have them buy a laptop for work only.
I work in healthcare, so I don't get to make lazydev excuses about time constraints and "edge cases." The people still using IE are the people who need my web sites the most.
If I were to read this statement uncharitably, I would conclude that there is plenty of money in healthcare to be wasted on supporting outdated technology, adding to the already outrageous costs of healthcare. Furthermore, if you're not lazy, you're probably creating unnecessary work.
> The people still using IE are the people who need my web sites the most.
From a holistic welfare perspective, giving these people a modern web browser would be better than maintaining their status quo.
I love working in healthcare but the hospital side is atrocious in my experience.
In the US the number has dropped significantly over the past five years (it was >50% but is now under 25%).
I will try to get the name tomorrow.
It is unlikely someone would purchase from anywhere than their home Windows PC, and I don't think many are using accessibility-related devices (the site was using a third party component that turned out to be terrible for accessibility, and it was years before anyone complained about it (and we then replaced it with one that was accessible)).
I just took a look at the logs for the past 12 months. Here are the relative numbers of successful orders by browser, normalized to Firefox on Windows 10 = 100.
On Windows 10: Chrome 602, IE11 116, Firefox 100, Edge 94.
On Windows 8: Chrome 44, Firefox 16, IE11 14, IE10 4.
On Windows 7: Chrome 76, Firefox 40, IE11 30, IE9 2.
On Vista: Chrome 8, Firefox 4.
On XP: Chrome 6, Firefox 2.
Me personally, I want my sites to be accessible from libraries, that old device in the closet you're attached to, survival centers and shelters, old kiosks stuck in the corner of a community space somewhere, and all other kinds of scenarios I haven't even imagined, but I don't want to leave those users out in the cold.
https://blog.angular.io/angular-v12-is-now-available-32ed51f...
There are enough sites out there still using it in production that I'll be surprised if nobody steps in to pick up development.
I only know this because I maintain a CSS framework that supports IE11, so I have to use IE quite a bit.
I've since given the laptop a clear out, reinstalling Windows 10 and installing Kubuntu as well. The issue has now gone away. Firefox now copes fine from either OS.
But it's actually working out great and we can as a bonus update these parts of the desktop app without even shutting it down. Our app has a web API that the scripts interact with.
The obvious downside is that it's using IE 11. WebView2 exists though which uses Microsoft's Chromium fork, but the control is only now reaching production quality. Like mere months ago. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
But it'll probably be what we eventually do especially as it supports Windows 7 which is quite something for emerging technology from Microsoft. We need this because surprisingly many customers still have Windows Server 2012 installs here and there. Sounds insane to run 10 year old servers for security reasons but the amazing thing is that Microsoft will support these to late 2023.
For now we're in our most advanced scripts using Bootstrap Vue + VueJS 2 + a few polyfills and it's amazed me how seamless it actually is in developing on Chromium 90 and everything just keeps working and looking almost identical on IE 11. Interaction, model bindings, templating, everything. I totally did NOT expect this. I expected... "Support". I mean... This is some achievement. There's been the occasional, minor stumbling block every three months or so but still...
That's 87.86% of what users are using (per Wikimedia's stats). To support the 1.76% of IE users, it will require a disproportionate amount of work that could negatively impact other development that benefits many more people.
That's the reality: Development time is a zero-sum game. If you do this you aren't doing this other thing, and in this case we're talking about under 2% that likely should be discouraged from using it.
PS - And this coming from someone whose uses are primarily on IE11 still (see my other post in the thread). Just because I personally benefit from IE11 staying around a few more years, doesn't mean the entire web should bend to that. IE11 must die, we just cannot turn on a needle, and when Edge dropped support for Java Applets/Flash it forced tons of organizations into IE11 for many more years than they would have wanted.
Avoid the bleeding edge to support those held back at LTS versions of common browsers, or if you use new tricks make sure they don't make things unusable on older-but-LTS browsers. Whether you consider IE11 an LTS browser or not is a matter for you to decide (yes, as it will be getting security updates for some time still, or no as it is seven years old, not getting any feature/support updates, and support for it is deprecated by even its own manufacture's apps).
Support accessibility by not using fancy things for the sake of it, and if you do something fancy make at least a little effort to have things degrade gracefully for those with accessibility issues. A lot of sites/apps skip this step, but shouldn't.
I've been in front-end dev for about 15 years and I don't remember that. I remember developing web applications to work in browsers that led to a significant number of our business' conversions, and practicing progressive enhancement in general.
Thankfully, with IE gone, the "lowest common denominator" is now pretty awesome.
I just wish we had that with email rendering engines.
It's one thing for a website to look a bit ugly and actions to require a few more clicks when accessed with an outdated browser. It's a completely different thing when you're left staring at a blank screen. The latter is what happens when an entire frontend framework decides that they'd rather give you no experience than a degraded experience because they don't want to maintain polyfills anymore.
I do sympathize with the hate for IE, having suffered it for long enough. But once we've decided that IE users don't deserve anything, who's next? How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice.
First they came for IE, and I did not speak out ... you know how the poem ends.
> How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader?
As far as I know, this was only ever an issue on Windows, and it's not anymore. IMO, the best third-party screen reader for Windows is NVDA [1], and it's free and open-source. Even a user stuck on Windows XP or Vista can get a version of NVDA from 2017 that works well with Chromium (assuming one can get a Chromium-based browser that runs on those old versions of Windows). On all other platforms, the screen reader is built into the platform itself, and updated along with it. Windows itself has had Narrator built in for a long time now, and Narrator in Windows 10 is getting good (disclosure: I was on the Narrator team at Microsoft for 3 years), but there are still valid reasons to use a third-party screen reader on Windows.
[1]: https://www.nvaccess.org/
Rallying against older browsers was once supposed to be a good fight against evil monopolists. Now it's about kicking away the ladder from people who are already the poorest and most powerless in the world, making them even less able to take advantage of the latest information and communication tools. And we're not even realizing what we're doing because we're so used to the first world fast upgrade cycle.
None of these are Internet Explorer, the problem in question. Chrome and its Play Store dependencies are backwards compatible to much older phones. Android browsers even years ago had better web platform support than IE11.
I fully sympathize and believe that web sites should be as compatible as possible. It's the web apps that fall apart once you take away modern functionality.
> In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice.
This really depends on how much their actual lives depend on being able to use the web. If they live in poverty and/or third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the web? What part of their life depends on what site exactly? Sure, communication is relevant, but we're already saying they have smart phones and thus data connections, email, and whatever native chat apps.
I'm not saying we should leave them behind technologically or that they don't matter or shouldn't have access to more information or knowledge, I'm just simply being practical with what is likely the real impact to their life.
In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content. The web already excels at that. Servers cache. Browsers cache. We don't need Vue to render a blog or article. Please leave such tech for SPAs and "apps" rather than sites or pages.
It won't affect their daily lives directly, but being able to access the knowledge scattered around the web is very important to human development in general.
What I wrote above is a kind of slippery slope argument, but it's a slope that I'm sure we're sliding down very quickly. You can't even read a technical blog these days without loading a whole SPA framework. If we keep going down this path, it will legitimately begin to impact the ability of people with older devices to access any information at all apart from those delivered through a handful of walled garden apps.
> In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content.
Completely agreed!
Sometimes it's just Google releasing whatever they want, use it on google.com and youtube.com while serving slower/buggier fallbacks to others, so other vendors have no choice but to implement Google's non-standard invention to avoid looking broken.
Google gets away with this a lot, because there are also many actual standards that Safari is ignoring. Without following dozens of mailing lists and bug trackers it's hard to tell what Google is pushing for themselves (e.g. AMP was a motivation for many "standards" proposals), and where others are dragging their feet.
I think the point seen here is really that if the standards org doesn't impact the browsers and the browser in question has greater than 60% market share then that browser is the standards org and the W3C doesn't matter. Who is going to harm Google? How would the W3C enforce their standards? If most of your users are on Chrome and Chrome sets the feature set rather than the W3C, why wouldn't you just build to Chrome?
There was a brief nice moment in history when WebKit, Gecko, Trident, and Presto each had enough market share that all the vendors had to cooperate.
Nowadays Trident and Presto are dead. Gecko is a great engine, but doesn't have enough market share to veto anything. So Blink can ship anything and claim it's supported "everywhere except Safari".
Better is to stick with standards and make the browser makers implement them properly. Of course things aren't perfect still (Safari has a reputation for being slow on the uptake so you can't use the latest & greatest if you need to support those users, and it is best to avoid the bleeding edge anyway (at least sticking as far back as the oldest LTS release of common browsers)).
I remember having to support IE 6 through 9, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera.
I think at least 25% of the team’s time was spent on getting IE 6 to behave acceptably.
No built-in browser debugger or ‘developer tools’ for some of those.
I will say, though, there were only a few screen resolutions to consider.
…and lots of <table>s.
Much respect.
I am working on a few different apps right now and none of them are targeting IE. It's a huge time suck and just not worth doing at the expensive of improving other parts of the application.
Basically, IE11 didn't change with the web so it's really out there now. You can develop for Firefox and all the Webkit/Blink offshoots just fine, but IE holds you up.
Dropping support for IE is the right thing to do at this point.
In the mid-90s, the internet was filled with pages that had "best viewed with Netscape Navigator" or "best viewed with Internet Explorer" icons. Twenty-five years later that mentality hasn't changed, and I don't think it ever will. It costs too much to target more than one or two browsers.
but honestly, we've ALWAYS had these issues, you should've been there when we had to support IE on Mac
IE6 has tons of quirks and nonstandard features, and sites that are truly written specifically for IE6 and target its features (e.g. activex) and numerous css bugs will simply not work or display correctly in any other browsers at all.
Newer versions of IE have to have two separate rendering modes. One of these, "quirks mode," is a non-standard mode that specifically emulates the broken IE6 functionality, because this is the only way to correctly display pages designed for IE6 in a modern browser.
On the other hand, people writing new sites in 2021 that support IE are people who are very concerned with compatibility who are being very careful and using zillions of LOC of pollyfills to ensure the sites work in IE. The sites these people create will work in other browsers not because of any property of IE6, but because the people making them also put a lot of work into ensuring they are compatible with other browsers, and dropping support for IE would save a lot of work without reducing compatibility with other browsers.
If a site loads in IE6 stay the hell away from it.
Especially, since microsoft is now supporting MS edge on windows 10.
Moreover even if some old app is using vbscript or some arcane IE only stuff, then they are unlikely to modify the app,let alone adopt Vue.
When you add that + longevity in deeply integrated enterprise software, everything makes more sense.
Not to upset any dev but really trying to put some fancy stuff and a bunch of frameworks in a piece of software that does one thing and has to work 24/7 is really a bad ideea.
In 2005 your employer asks for internal app, says you've got to use kendo or some such UI framework. Or maybe they want an autocomplete drop-down and you picked one that in the future will turn out to be not standards compliant. Or you were asked to use the stylesheet from another project to get them to look the same and that's not compliant. But you don't even know, as it only has to work on IE8 as that's all that's available to your users. You make it. It works fine.
Fast forward to 2015, no-ones touched the app in 10 years, the SVN server the code was on has been thrown away, and it's either rewrite the whole thing or force everyone to keep on using IE8.
That's what generally happened, not dev incompetence.
Edge in Enterprise Mode solves this as you provide edge with a list of sites that need IE, then Edge will automatically open those sites in IE Tab (or in previous versions of Edge, redirect the user automatically to IE)
Our Asian enterprise customers use IE11 by a staggering majority, even with Edge installed on their machine.
I'm surprised to learn a framework the size of Vue was still supporting it until now.
I do create B2B apps. Last time I had to support IE11 was 6 years ago.
[0]: https://blogs.sap.com/2021/02/02/internet-explorer-11-will-n... [1]: https://www.sap.com/why-sap.html
– The font rendering works better for my eyesight.
– Killer feature: Ctrl+N/K clones the browser window/tab including the history. I.e. you can effectively fork the history. EDIT: And, equally important, opening a link in a new tab/window also preserves (clones) the history.
– Certain keyboard operations have better usability than on other browsers.
– The title bar + address/tab bar height height is smallest among all browsers (after some configuration).
I’m slowly getting used to the inevitability of migrating to Firefox. The font rendering and especially the clone-by-keyboard feature are the hardest part though. (And the fact that Firefox doesn’t allow yellow as a search highlight color.)
However while looking around at a bug report to get MacType to work in Firefox [0] I came across a setting in Firefox's about:config [1] that can change the font rendering and that might help you out. Not sure about the history forking thing but there may be some Firefox extension to help with that.
[0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/673 [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652141
It’s all a question of trade-offs of course
I got used to losing it eventually after switching over, but I do remember it being a painful transition for me too.
[1] https://www.userchrome.org/
Regarding font rendering, there have been multiple issue reports over the years, although most users complain that Firefox doesn't render text like Chrome, which I tend to find even worse than Firefox. ;)
Edit: Oh and if you have a large webapp, the F12 developer tools are just a crashfest and are unusable so you can't even debug what IE is doing weirdly.
Would you recommend only displaying an error screen for any users who try to view the site using Internet Explorer or another old browser? Or should I let those browsers try to display what they can, and maybe also a warning message?
Thanks, that's what I was thinking. Is there a standard way to detect whether to show the warning message based on which browser is being used?
Best to keep the IE 11 warning code in a separate (nomodule?) script file