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I created an IE11 end of support countdown

Gabriel Laroche on April 16, 2019

Check it out! A few months ago, I was working on a nasty ie11 bug and I was wondering when that horrible browser would stop being supported by Micr...
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Ben Halpern

Nice 😄

dev.to officially does not support IE based on us getting no traffic from it.

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Desi

My proudest accomplishment at work is discontinuing IE support 😂

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glowong

-at job interview-
CTO: 'name one of your biggest accomplishments at your previous job'
you: 'phased out IE'.
CTO: take my job

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Sebastijan Grabar

This seems like the problem of what was before, a chicken or an egg? :D

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Gabriel Laroche

Music to my ears 😂😂

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Sebastian Silbermann

Did you drop IE support because you were not getting any traffic or are you not getting IE 11 traffic because you do not support it? Maybe the irony is just lost on me...

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rhymes

Still 6 years to go?! OMG 😬

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Phil Nash

That's exactly what I thought! 😅

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Gabriel Laroche

Yeah 😢😢

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Mehdi M.

Yo! In the meantime, I created canistop.net to keep track of monthly IE11 usage.

This legacy browser is definitely one of the biggest web developers problems. :p

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rhymes

Feature idea: add population data for each country and calculate the percentage of people still using IE. For example 2.16% of the US population is still several million people :-)

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Mehdi M.

Yes, but from a country to another, the % of internet users may vary a lot: in some countries it’s more than 95%, in others it’s less than 50%. As these data tends to be not super accurate, at the end I prefer to stick to the Can I Use data (coming from Statscounter), which are the less inaccurate ones.

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rhymes • Edited

What I'm proposing is not to change data source, but to use use the data you have to display how many actual human beings are impacted. It puts percentages in perspective.

So, your website says that 45.08% of Pitcairn Islands use IE11, Wikipedia (I'm sure there's a database somewhere to get population data) says that 50 people live on Pitcairn, which means that an estimated 22 are using IE.

This way, you can show that that percentage amount to that many amount of people, you could even show an estimated total of how many humans on Earth are still using IE11 by summing the IE11 users in each country.

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Mehdi M.

Yes, but many % people in Pitcairn are using internet?

The data from Can I Stop, Can I Use and StatsCounter are usage market shares, so they are relative to internet visitor usage, not to living population.

For exemple, during a typical day I’m regularly browsing on at least 6 browsers, but in the browsers usage data I’m not 1 user, I’m 6 entries, one for every technical context I’m using.

So you can’t compare browsers usage data to people data.

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rhymes

The data from Can I Stop, Can I Use and StatsCounter are usage market shares, so they are relative to internet visitor usage, not to living population.

Ah! Got it, thanks for the clarification, now I understand! I thought they were unique visitors, though not even that would be literally comparable to population without some sampling (many users could use the same device or appear as one single device by using a NAT).

Well, let's not do that then :D

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Gabriel Laroche

Oh that's really cool! Could I link to your site in my ie11 death countdown?

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Mehdi M.

Of course! No need to ask for permission, I'm the one who will be grateful.

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Massimo Artizzu

As a little ironic joke, I made sure that this little app wouldn't work in ie11 by using es6 arrow functions, let and const

But IE11 does support let and const 😉

Anyway, I was already aware that Microsoft had to support IE until the end of support of Windows 10. I wish they didn't, as they themselves consider it a dead browser.

In the end, we have to hope clients will just stop requiring IE support before 2025.

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Gabriel Laroche

Well well well, I didn't know that... thanks for the info :)

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Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 • Edited

You're a hero 😉

Real talk: Microsoft already discontinued support, they're only giving the tiniest minimal support to ie11

Realer talk: almost no one really has IE11 support as a hard requirement, unless your company or client made some poor choices in the oughts and got vendor locked to proprietary Microsoft features (looking at you, ActiveX). PMs and devs who think of IE11 support as a "nice-to-have" are flat wrong. It's not nice to have. It's destructive and costly for everyone - users, mgmt, and devs alike.

Realest talk: just like they did with xp, Microsoft will probably extend support for IE11 past that due date for anyone willing to pay enough.

Take away: if you're not locked to ActiveX controls, drop IE11 support immediately. Leave an explainer for users advising them why (security, ux quality).

I'd like to see some more links on that page to explanations of why and how you should stop supporting IE11 today, without waiting for EOL.

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Gabriel Laroche

One of our big clients is a car conpany and according to our analytics, we have more users on ie11 than firefox and that's reason enough for us to keep support for ie11, i hope we stop support before EOL, but only tine will tell.

I would love to add more links to explanation of why we should all drop support for ie11, if you have any, let me know. I have plans to add a link to meduz's site that shows the percentage of ie11 users in certain regions.

Sidenote : Canada has a relatively high ie11 userbase, so we still have to keep support

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Carlos Sanchez
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Tom Arild Jakobsen

RIP Willie, 11

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Gabriel Laroche

nice

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Bugsy Sailor

Wait, 6 more years?!

I certainly didn't expect that.

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Marko Kolombo
tagline.innerHTML = 'Internet Explorer 11 is dead and it has been dead for :';

SAVAGE

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Kyle Griffin

6 Years of pain and suffering.

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Enrique Moreno Tent

6 years... oh boy -_-

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Shannon Crabill

I love it.

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willemm • Edited

"6 YEARS!!!!" .....so depressing, or you could use an ecma script shim that goes a loooong way towards making it more bearable.

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Gabriel Laroche

Quite true, where I work, our JavaScript works quite well in IE11, because we have Babel in place. However, the CSS, is usually the problem and sometimes using the "ie11 media query" doesn't quite cut it haha.