Who takes Internet Explorer still into account nowadays?

#webdev #html #css #javascript

Please also let us know the context of the project where you do (not) account for IE.

Top comments (8)

Kyle Agronick • Jun 17 '19 • Edited

On a recent internal business app I got the go-ahead to drop IE. All users have Chrome and many have Edge or Firefox.

If the user is on IE we hide the login form and display a message saying your browser is outdated and will not work on this site. They have to click a button that says "Force Log In (Not Recommended)". After that they see a big ugly confirm() dialog telling them to use another browser. We tell them their browser can not run modern JavaScript and the site will not work properly. If they persist through two error messages we let them log in.

All the grid layouts break. All the CustomEvents break. classList.replace breaks. Event handlers with passive or once break. Babel doesn't polyfill these things by default and I don't care. My team is too small. Why should I spend my time coding around self imposed limitations when the users could just use another browser and have a much better experience?

The warnings work for most people but some people are just stubborn. I suppose they see the E and that is what the Internet is and they don't know any better. In the message we specifically ask if they don't have any other browser for them to contact us. So far no one has. I think as more of those people experience the site breaking in strange and mysterious ways they'll stop using IE. All error reporting is disabled on IE as well.

It is my belief that as a web developers we should stop wasting our time supporting an unmaintained browser. One that Microsoft says shouldn't be used and is nothing more than a compatibility tool. We are punishing the majority of our users shipping bloated transpiled and polyfilled code. If we stopped supporting IE the cost, time, and energy savings would be tremendous. We should just tell users to get rid of IE and give them a list of alternative browsers, the same way we did with IE6 many years ago.

Josh Goldberg • Jun 16 '19

A lot of school districts don't have the budget or expertise to upgrade their very old computers from the Internet Explorer + Windows 7 combination. Even if they could get Windows 10 for free or cheap, they might have custom software that only works on IE and/or Windows 7. It's very unfortunate. There's a similar situation with businesses that don't have the ability to better fund their IT departments.

Here's an example: some older versions of Sharepoint have an odd quirk where embedded pages (iframes) viewed on IE 11 get viewed in Compatibility mode for IE 10. That makes it so if you want to support users embedding your site in that view, you might have to support IE 10 in some way.

Source: I spent a month fixing IE 10 specific bugs in Microsoft Sway (and documented it on GitHub). It's fascinating work.

ItsASine (Kayla) • Jun 17 '19

Healthcare and education clients. Any business to business, really, since you can't assume your end users have permissions to install Chrome on their systems or that they have a Windows version that has Edge.

Darkø Tasevski • Jun 16 '19 • Edited

Streaming sites and airline site(s) I've worked on had to support at least IE11 because we were getting a lot of hits from IE. The interesting thing is that most purchases came from Chrome/Safari but we still had enough visits from IE so that PMs could justify supporting it.

Right now, I'm starting to miss IE11 quirks and issues as the current application I'm working on must support some ancient WebKit/Safari 6. FML...

Ben Halpern • Jun 18 '19

We do not support any versions of IE with DEV. Traffic from that browser is less than negligible. Easy for us to drop it.

It helps that we’re a new thing and that the site’s basic functionality of reading articles is still generally supported.

Timkor • Jun 18 '19

I can imaging there are not much developers using IE😅

Keith Greer • Aug 28 '19

We build websites for large UK companies, a lot of whom still use IE 11 in customer facing/front facing departments so we are forced to support it.

The Web Dev team I am part of are going to hold a party when/if IE finally gets the boot. We will have costumes made of all of the major browsers and whoever gets the short straw wears the blue 'E' costume and we take turns in kicking them repeatedly.