A front-end developer from Mar del Plata, Argentina. Passionate about CSS, accessibility, and JS. Currently working on "just a small fix", as I've been doing for the last 15 years.
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.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
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.