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October 14, 2025 - remember this date, as this will supp...
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Yes, yes and a thousand times yes, using an older browser is insecure for the user and to get a new one is free, you have a lot of choices. None would argue that not supporting Netscape is an accessibility problem, and as a community we should punish non standard implementations.
For years we suffered with IE only apps and we as nice guys and gals made an extra effort to support IE, we limit ourselves, we worked extra to appease IE users which only resulted in Microsoft keeping their practices. If no other free browsers existed I would agree, we should support IE, but it was never the case.
We as devs, kept IE alive, we kept it crappy. A bad product has to die and that process starts by stop being supported.
Better spend you time making your site readable by real accessibility tools, for people with visibility problems, make your sites lighter so you don't need a beast to run it, only add JS if necessary and as little as possible; that is well spent time, supporting old obsolete browsers when there are so many modern and free ones readily available, to me is not just a waste of our time is also hindering progress.
look at me, IE made me all riled up...
No one is willingly using IE. No one. They are either locked in frozen corporate / government devices or don't know any better. By dropping support you're not punishing a browser, you're punishing people that are not tech savvy enough to even know what a browser is, let alone install a new one.
If locked in corporate environments they should be pressured because old browsers are not only "ugly" they are unsafe and "corporate" can easily allow the install of other browser or even installed themselves.
If someone doesn't know better, they'll learn, people didn't know how to use an email, people didn't know how to use a mouse; if you suspect your target audience may not know that other browsers exists, add some links to other browser, but that is for a very specific niche of users, I wouldn't blame if dev.to doesn't support IE, if you don't know how to install a browser, you'll not understand a word on the site anyway.
I suspect nobody worries about Androids 1.5 browser, and that is a real lock in for people, because in an older phone you can't put a modern browser and many people only have access to older phones; unlike desktop browsers.
if you don't know how to install a browser, you'll not understand a word on the site anyway.is the most elitist thing I've read on dev.to so far.ehm, given that most of the content of this website is technical and 99% related to web development, I'm pretty confident that if you code for a browser you should know what a browser is. That's not elitist, is common sense.
A quick check on the definition of elitist
"but that is for a very specific niche of users, I wouldn't blame if dev.to doesn't support IE, if you don't know how to install a browser, you'll not understand a word on the site anyway."
Is fair that a woodworking site assume that their visitors know what wood is, getting offended by that obvious assumption is ridiculous.
I must say your comment is is the most selfrighteous thing I've read on dev.to so far.
I realize my mistake. I thought you were talking about ALL websites, not just Dev.to. my apologies.
no problem, IE is a controverted topic it makes me all riled up too :D specially because as a Linux user those IE only years where tuff.
the memories, the horror...
Haha indeed.
The new Edge has an IE mode for websites that require IE. Specifically in enterprise environments. You're punishing users and devs if you make concessions or avoid new features to cater to IE
While I agree that many popular brands and sites fail to support IE, I disagree that we should all follow suite.
I think you can only make that decision after having some data on your traffic. If your 10% or 20% of your visitors are coming from IE, is it really worth hampering their experience? I've worked on ecommerce sites with nearly 60% of their traffic coming from users on IE.
In my opinion, software exists to solve problems for humans and it should take into consideration the constraints of those humans; some people aren't going to be able to move from IE to a different browser. I believe our software shouldn't exclude those people when we have the means to support them.
Granted, I'm one opinion, I'm sure there are fine arguments against supporting IE.
I agree with you. I have not yet to meet the customer that is willing to miss any visitor.
I work mostly on enterprise customers and there on IE11 (not Edge) is still rolled out on Windows 10 when employee gets new PC. I don't expect this to change until Microsoft drops IE11 support entirely. Of course for hobby websites it is fine to drop IE support but for the rest of the internet supporting IE should be as important as supporting accessibility.
From our most recent stats we have 11% on IE11 so for us it's definitely an accessibility issue. We could of course lose those customers but that's anathema for our business colleagues, so we are attempting to measure the support cost against their value.. tricky!
Yeah, the enterprise problem. I don't have experience with such things, so I won't comment. But, IE support being not important "for hobby websites" is, in my opinion, not true. Not only because websites such as GitHub also drop it, but also because some of these websites might target IE-focused demographic.
can you remind me who owns Github nowdays?, ha, not even MS supports IE, even them recognize the annoyance. Windows should offer other browsers at install time and MS drop their browser efforts, why do they want a browser after all, they are collecting everything at OS level anyway. It even must be annoying for them to deal with all duplicated collected data. :D
for enterprise customers is just lazy IT, if you have an old SAP (or something alike) that needs IE, just get two browsers, you shouldn't use IE in the wild anyway, is too insecure; you can keep your IE just for your enterprise "IE only" website. The rest are just excuses from the IT department not wanting to do their job.
I just came to comment for nostalgic reasons as I have written web code for around 20 years & have watched its evolution & I'm finally happy to see IE almost gone. I remember the time when learning HTML/CSS/JS where the main advice was to code for IE only. It's great to see the exact opposite. I was also around for the transition from coding strictly for IE to creating a secondary rule set for IE (<!--[if IE]>). Edge is a damn good improvement, but I still stick to Brave or FF for my main. I am a dual OS user so I prefer cross-platforms as my mains. Great article. Many younger devs might not ever know the struggles of the fiercest browser wars lol.
In line with what some of the other people are saying, I have 10%...I say again, 10% of my user base for an app I manage that still uses IE. To say those people aren't worthy of a good experience is incredibly elitist. I chose my stack knowing full well I'd have to support older browsers.
As mentioned by Facundo,
you're punishing people that are not tech savvy enough to even know what a browser isThere are no carte blanche statements in web development, and saying stuff like is in this article is a detriment to what we are doing as developers.
For sure. I think Areknawo is working off the assumption of a 1.5% global usage stat though, I'd include IE support if 10% of my user base was on it too.
Supporting IE is not about IE support. Is about making webs and apps with progressive enhancement so any device with any browser can use it.
It's easy to focus on the IE market share, but what about the sum of all other minor browsers, including old versions of the evergreen ones? There are quite some people running frozen devices (government and corporate) that simple cannot upgrade, and when we check the stats, we can see that they normally have much greater share than IE.
Consider for instance the support for Grid. We can somewhat support the old spec that IE 10 / 11 uses, even automate that with PostCSS and Autoprefixer in the build. But for the sake of the argument, let's just consider their 1.52% as "unsupported"... well, if we check the stats for grid support at caniuse, we'll see that minor browsers + old versions of current browsers add up to a 6.47%.
Focusing in IE greatly underestimates the issue, and can be causing bad decisions.
This doesn't mean we should be coding like in the dark ages, we can and should be using those awesome new features of CSS, but always considering them as progressive enhancement layers. It doesn't even take that much effort, as mobile layouts are almost always done in a blocky way that could be served as the fallback too. So from the CSS point of view, I believe we should always be serving resilient, progressively enhanced layouts.
When it comes to JS, I totally agree that some of the features simply cannot be transpiled and this can leave us with no other choice but to drop support of older / lacking browsers. Same thing for the many, many web APIs. But we should be really careful when making the decision. Tools like Codepen can get away with no supporting IE at all, as they need the modern features for their system, and their audience is 100% web devs / designers. But for the average website, we can transpile most of the stuff, put some thought on whether we really need that non-transpilable feature, and consider which APIs are safe to use as progressive enhancement and which ones are simply scratching the itch of using the most recent stuff just for the sake of using it.
All in all, we should be really conscious and deliberate on the decision. It's easy to mask it as "we're dropping support for that archaic browser that's keeping the web in the dark ages", but the truth is that we are dropping support for the old, the poor, and those locked in frozen devices. It's people that we're leaving behind, not a browser.
Very insightful comment! I agree. I think it all depends on the demographic you're targetting. If you're willing to narrow it a bit - it's your choice. But you'll certainly never make everyone in the world happy.
It's all also region-depended. Here's a nice website that somewhat shows the usage of IE around the globe. If your website is targetting people leaving in areas where IE is still very much in use, you have no choice but to support it.
Wow, well done!
I was skeptical when I saw the title, expecting to read a list of complaints like I've heard from so many other devs, but look at all those facts & statistics. What a great resource, thanks for sharing.
The reason we have to support old browsers is because we keep supporting old browsers..