9 ms·

Microsoft decides IE 10 has had its fun: Termination set for Jan 2020

213 points by benryon 8y ago

moocowtruck 8y ago
please terminate ie11 in 2020 1/2
- dspillett 8y ago
  MS dropping support won't stop corporates using it. Apart from a few exceptions (running on Windows Server 2012 and some embedded versions, where IE11 has until soon not been supported) IE10 (and below) hasn't been supported since 2016. All they are doing here is pulling the plug on those few remaining environments. If your clients are still running IE10 on some ancient version of desktop Windows now, they probably still will be on 2020. Heck, one of our clients (a major UK bank) seems to be having trouble getting a few remaining members of their staff off IE8. And they can't even try dropping IE11 without breaking previous guarantees or changing the path of Windows 10 at least slightly. They locked IE11's support life-cycle to that of Windows 10, and they've stated that Win10 will not be replaced, only updated/upgraded. IE11 is officially here to stay, and even if it wasn't it would be unofficially here to stay if you have clients anything like ours.
  - tashoecraft 8y ago
    Luckily our contracts state we only support maintained, supported browsers (not sure the exact language). So once Microsoft ends support for IE11 it'll be gone the same day. The majority of our users (users and clients are different people) are on a modern browser, but when the client goes to test they are normally on ie11 which gives so many headaches.
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    > having trouble getting a few remaining members of their staff off IE All it takes is an old business-critical web app that uses ActiveX controls (or a specific version of Java) to lock thousands of Corporate users into old IE version. I believe App-V can be leveraged to provide older apps into new OSs, but I'm not sure if IE is supported on that. Failing that, there's always the option of an old Citrix farm, and seamless app provision...
  - efficax 8y ago
    Indeed. I hack on a web app with over 100k daily users and we only just last month decided to drop support for IE8, and that only because some third party libraries that will simplify things for us don't support it
    - dspillett 8y ago
      Our chief leverage for pushing back on IE8 support is that out-of-the-box (which is pretty much how that have it configured) it doesn't support SSL settings that pass up-to-date recommendations. Each year we are pen-tested by a third party, each year that client complains that the testers say the SSL setup is potentially insecure, every year we point out that we'd be more than happy to follow the recommendations (in fact we feel dirty not doing!) but it would lock out a number of their users if they were not given an alternate browser or otherwise reconfigured. Fingers crossed this year is the last time: everyone there should have Chrome as an option, and everyone not depending on old apps (ActivX etc) should have IE11 not IE8. The login screens have had "are you sure you want to use this browser?" messages for IE8 users for a while, but some still use it, though only a few. This is legacy application. Thankfully for our new applications the contracts state nothing older than IE11 will be supported, and that we only begrudgingly support that so users of IE may experience display issues or other minor usability problems from time-to-time.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    > Heck, one of our clients (a major UK bank) seems to be having trouble getting a few remaining members of their staff off IE8. I just checked one of our major internal systems, still a fair number on MSIE7 -- 1 in 66 hits, representing 1 in 34 machines.
  - CWuestefeld 8y ago
    And even terminating the browser itself doesn't solve the problem. There's still the accursed compatibility mode. We still have to support IE7 and IE8 because of this (it looks ugly, but is still functional).
    - dspillett 8y ago
      > the accursed compatibility mode Ah yes, the fun of an almost-impossible-to-reliably-detect setting that affects your display and sometimes worse.
      - emergie 8y ago
        > almost-impossible-to-reliably-detect have you ever tried document.documentMode?
        dspillett 8y ago
        I thought that was only in IE11, but apparently it has been around since IE8. It is only available client-side though, and while you can feed it back to the server if relevant there (i.e. server-side rendering which most of the legacy code I'm responsible for does) you'd have to keep doing so in case the mode changes between requests. Also you are forced to add in extra conditionals to your page whether you are working client- or server- side: you can respond to this property to deal with display differences via CSS selectors.
- Forge36 8y ago
  I wish. Unfortunately Microsoft never created a full alternative for embedded applications was never created my company's date to stop using IE11 by 2021.
- irrational 8y ago
  IE11 support is currently slated to end in 2025.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zackkatz 8y ago
Just yesterday I hit an IE 11 issue that forced a JavaScript hack to resolve. Goodbye, IE 10. Hopefully IE 11 will soon follow.
- pilif 8y ago
  > Goodbye, IE 10. Hopefully IE 11 will soon follow. IE 11 is still part of Windows 10 and it's in fact the only browser shipping in the long-term support version of Windows 10 Expect IE11 to be around for the duration that Windows 10 is around which, unfortunately, is going to be forever (as Windows 10 is said to be the last version of Windows ever released) or at least for the foreseeable future
  - louthy 8y ago
    Edge is getting a Chromium back-end with talk of Windows 7 and 8 support. So, perhaps that's a strategy to kill IE11 too (fingers crossed).
  - jayflux 8y ago
    I think Edge will continue to exist as a product, it will just have a Chromium backend. Also there’s no guarantee that IE 11 will last forever just because it’s on Windows 10. There can always be a major update in future with it removed if MS really want to kill it..
  - robohoe 8y ago
    > as Windows 10 is said to be the last version of Windows ever released Is that because "continuous rolling updates" for Windows 10 or because Microsoft will eventually replace the Windows kernel with some other kernel, such as Linux (just a conspiracy theory of mine)?
    - ken 8y ago
      Microsoft, like most companies, don't use the internal implementation as part of the name brand. It was called "Windows" long before it got the current kernel. ("Edge" is switching engines, too, but not names.) I see no reason they'd change the Windows name even if they decided to switch out the kernel.
yakshaving_jgt 8y ago
Good riddance, though there is a somewhat masochistic pleasure in finding hacky solutions for old IE versions. I once figured out that IE7 can be tricked into understanding the :before and :after CSS pseudo-elements with this: .thing { *zoom: expression( this.runtimeStyle.zoom="1", this.insertBefore( document.createElement("i"), this.firstChild).className="ie-before" ); } .thing .ie-before { *zoom: expression(this.runtimeStyle['zoom'] = '1', this.innerHTML = '|'); }
- sephoric 8y ago
  How did you even figure that out? That sounds like it would take having IE's source code to figure out.
  - Zalastax 8y ago
    It looks like fairly standard JS to me. I don't know where to read about it but there are some details on the deprecation blog article: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2008/10/16/ending-expressions/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2008/10/16/ending-expres...
    - richardwhiuk 8y ago
      That's CSS, with embedded JS, which is relatively non standard.
      - cstejerean 8y ago
        It’s very non-standard, it was IE only until they dropped it in IE8, but it was one of the features being abused to make up for other css features that IE6 or 7 lacked.
      - Zalastax 8y ago
        Sure, but my point still stands: figuring this out doesn't require arcane knowledge, contrary to what was suggested. The code inside the expression looks like standard JS. The downvotes and your reply suggests I should have communicated more clearly.
theodorejb 8y ago
Official announcement: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/Bringing-Internet-Explorer-11-to-Windows-Server-2012-and-Windows/ba-p/325297 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/B... > We will also publish the IE11 upgrade through Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) for all versions of Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8 Standard later this year. Nice! I wonder, will they eventually do this with their Chromium-based version of Edge?
- talawahdotnet 8y ago
  Yea I really am hoping their Chromium based browser gives them the combination of broad compatibility and enterprise integration needed bring about the end of IE 11.
- untog 8y ago
  I can't imagine they will ever push their Chromium reboot as a replacement for IE, it would break brittle intranet sites everywhere. Hopefully as a separate download, though.
  - saidajigumi 8y ago
    It should be noted that Microsoft has a history of massive engineering investments in backwards-compatibility, esp. around Windows. I don't know that that's the case here, but there's certainly cultural and technical precedent.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Their blog posts claimed they are planning for a Windows 7+ version of Chromium-based Edge, and may explore cross-platform beyond Windows.
IdontRememberIt 8y ago
(I work for a company running a popular mainstream classified ad website in Europe) After some investigation (because we wanted to crush Google Analytics numbers), we found that +95% of our IE9 and IE10 trafic reported in GA is in fact from bots and proxied clients.
- dccoolgai 8y ago
  Just out of curiosity, can you describe broadly how you made that determination (I assume it was something more complex than just looking at the UA string?)
  - IdontRememberIt 8y ago
    We started our journey by trying to understand why ie9 had higher figures than ie10. As we also have an analytics on the server side, we extracted a raw log. We used our existing tools that can filter "fake" or "foe" trafic by its behavior. We then manualy analyzed representative filtered samples (still by analyzing its behavior). It took some time, but was worth it, because we found an opposite conclusion than GA: most of the real traffic ($) from our ie9-10 samples is on ie10. So now the dev. guideline is: forget ie9 and make it not too ugly/broken on ie10. ;) PS: We had to do a manual work of filtering because our tools do not filter all the traffic that we know being fake or foe because we often have false positive.
ptyyy 8y ago
I read this as IE11 and got prematurely excited. Good news though.
Jaruzel 8y ago
IE as a browser does suck, no argument there. However, I (and I'm sure many other Windows devs too) find the .NET WebBrowser control very useful - it's a easy drop-in control that's part of the .NET framework. It shares a lot with with IE codebase, so if IE gets killed off, would that include the control? It certainly would no longer be updated. I've looked in depth at the embedded Chromium project, but there's simply TOO much baggage with that making it total overkill when all you want to do is render some HTML in a line-of-business application.
- PretzelFisch 8y ago
  There is a .net control now that lets you embed edge. The old IE control was annoying with it's default to ie7 impersonation mode that could only be controlled via registry settings
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    Is there?! Is it part of the default framework, or do you have NuGet it? Yes... FEATURE_EMULATION reg key - I know it well ;)
    - PretzelFisch 8y ago
      WebView is a NuGet package https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern-webview-winforms-wpf-apps/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern-webvie...
- Avery3R 8y ago
  They're not going to kill off IE, it's the only browser on server/ltsb SKUs. They've said that edge is a no go for those because of how frequently edge gets updates compared to the os.
  - babypuncher 8y ago
    Why they can't figure out how to update the browser independently of the OS is beyond comprehension. IE and Edge are the only non-evergreen browsers which is probably they are the most problematic to target. I develop primarily in Firefox, but I never have bugs pop up in Chromium or WebKit browsers, only IE and Edge.
piotrkubisa 8y ago
It sounds like this is the best time to fetch virtual machines from modern.ie [1] website. It is worth noting that IE is still used in many Point of Sales or other embedded devices. // Though I guess in most of scenarios it is IE6 for obvious reasons. [1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
mtmail 8y ago
I saw the beginning of the third Browser War was proclaimed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#Third_Browser_War:_2018-Present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#Third_Browser_War...
irrational 8y ago
If anyone is wondering about IE11, MS says "Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the version of Windows on which it is installed." Extended support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025. Extended support for Windows Server 2016 ends on January 11, 2027. Presumably one or those 2 dates could be considered the termination date for IE11. My company has chosen the 2025 date as when we will stop support for IE11 in our web pages/apps.
- dak1 8y ago
  6 more years is a really long time on the web. You may want to base it instead on usage metrics — IE, once usage drops below what % are you willing to stop testing against a browser? Win7 support is ending Jan 2020 also, at which point IE11 will only be supported on Win10 (and it's not default there). So that may be a good date to start considering ending IE11 support as well, especially with Chromium-Edge coming out later this year.
  - aboutruby 8y ago
    If you are selling software to other companies. And out of thousands of companies, one of them bringing a significant percentage of revenue is using IEX, you may want to consider supporting IEX. It can also be useful for future contracts. Usage doesn't mean everything.
    - tatersolid 8y ago
      Seconded. Just try to run a B2B SaaS without supporting IE11. You will lose out on a ton of large-but-slow-moving customers. Like banks, insurance companies, etc. who all seem to have critical internal systems that only work on IE11 in compatibility mode.
      - TimTheTinker 8y ago
        This is why our company is still supporting IE11, and will be for some time to come. Personally, I'm hoping the app my team builds will be able to finally drop IE11 support once the new Chromium-based Edge app becomes available on Windows 7 and 8.
Jedd 8y ago
> Over the course of the northern hemisphere's spring ... A delightful phrasing that more northern hemisphere journalists would do well to adopt (slightly less constraining or cumbersome than actually specifying a date range, but infinitely preferable to the parochial 'season of year').
pixelpp 8y ago
RIP

213 points by benryon 8y ago

moocowtruck 8y ago

please terminate ie11 in 2020 1/2

dspillett 8y ago
MS dropping support won't stop corporates using it. Apart from a few exceptions (running on Windows Server 2012 and some embedded versions, where IE11 has until soon not been supported) IE10 (and below) hasn't been supported since 2016. All they are doing here is pulling the plug on those few remaining environments. If your clients are still running IE10 on some ancient version of desktop Windows now, they probably still will be on 2020. Heck, one of our clients (a major UK bank) seems to be having trouble getting a few remaining members of their staff off IE8. And they can't even try dropping IE11 without breaking previous guarantees or changing the path of Windows 10 at least slightly. They locked IE11's support life-cycle to that of Windows 10, and they've stated that Win10 will not be replaced, only updated/upgraded. IE11 is officially here to stay, and even if it wasn't it would be unofficially here to stay if you have clients anything like ours.
- tashoecraft 8y ago
  Luckily our contracts state we only support maintained, supported browsers (not sure the exact language). So once Microsoft ends support for IE11 it'll be gone the same day. The majority of our users (users and clients are different people) are on a modern browser, but when the client goes to test they are normally on ie11 which gives so many headaches.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  > having trouble getting a few remaining members of their staff off IE All it takes is an old business-critical web app that uses ActiveX controls (or a specific version of Java) to lock thousands of Corporate users into old IE version. I believe App-V can be leveraged to provide older apps into new OSs, but I'm not sure if IE is supported on that. Failing that, there's always the option of an old Citrix farm, and seamless app provision...
- efficax 8y ago
  Indeed. I hack on a web app with over 100k daily users and we only just last month decided to drop support for IE8, and that only because some third party libraries that will simplify things for us don't support it
  - dspillett 8y ago
    Our chief leverage for pushing back on IE8 support is that out-of-the-box (which is pretty much how that have it configured) it doesn't support SSL settings that pass up-to-date recommendations. Each year we are pen-tested by a third party, each year that client complains that the testers say the SSL setup is potentially insecure, every year we point out that we'd be more than happy to follow the recommendations (in fact we feel dirty not doing!) but it would lock out a number of their users if they were not given an alternate browser or otherwise reconfigured. Fingers crossed this year is the last time: everyone there should have Chrome as an option, and everyone not depending on old apps (ActivX etc) should have IE11 not IE8. The login screens have had "are you sure you want to use this browser?" messages for IE8 users for a while, but some still use it, though only a few. This is legacy application. Thankfully for our new applications the contracts state nothing older than IE11 will be supported, and that we only begrudgingly support that so users of IE may experience display issues or other minor usability problems from time-to-time.
- isostatic 8y ago
  > Heck, one of our clients (a major UK bank) seems to be having trouble getting a few remaining members of their staff off IE8. I just checked one of our major internal systems, still a fair number on MSIE7 -- 1 in 66 hits, representing 1 in 34 machines.
- CWuestefeld 8y ago
  And even terminating the browser itself doesn't solve the problem. There's still the accursed compatibility mode. We still have to support IE7 and IE8 because of this (it looks ugly, but is still functional).
  - dspillett 8y ago
    > the accursed compatibility mode Ah yes, the fun of an almost-impossible-to-reliably-detect setting that affects your display and sometimes worse.
    - emergie 8y ago
      > almost-impossible-to-reliably-detect have you ever tried document.documentMode?
      - dspillett 8y ago
        I thought that was only in IE11, but apparently it has been around since IE8. It is only available client-side though, and while you can feed it back to the server if relevant there (i.e. server-side rendering which most of the legacy code I'm responsible for does) you'd have to keep doing so in case the mode changes between requests. Also you are forced to add in extra conditionals to your page whether you are working client- or server- side: you can respond to this property to deal with display differences via CSS selectors.
Forge36 8y ago
I wish. Unfortunately Microsoft never created a full alternative for embedded applications was never created my company's date to stop using IE11 by 2021.
irrational 8y ago
IE11 support is currently slated to end in 2025.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

zackkatz 8y ago

Just yesterday I hit an IE 11 issue that forced a JavaScript hack to resolve. Goodbye, IE 10. Hopefully IE 11 will soon follow.

pilif 8y ago
> Goodbye, IE 10. Hopefully IE 11 will soon follow. IE 11 is still part of Windows 10 and it's in fact the only browser shipping in the long-term support version of Windows 10 Expect IE11 to be around for the duration that Windows 10 is around which, unfortunately, is going to be forever (as Windows 10 is said to be the last version of Windows ever released) or at least for the foreseeable future
- louthy 8y ago
  Edge is getting a Chromium back-end with talk of Windows 7 and 8 support. So, perhaps that's a strategy to kill IE11 too (fingers crossed).
- jayflux 8y ago
  I think Edge will continue to exist as a product, it will just have a Chromium backend. Also there’s no guarantee that IE 11 will last forever just because it’s on Windows 10. There can always be a major update in future with it removed if MS really want to kill it..
- robohoe 8y ago
  > as Windows 10 is said to be the last version of Windows ever released Is that because "continuous rolling updates" for Windows 10 or because Microsoft will eventually replace the Windows kernel with some other kernel, such as Linux (just a conspiracy theory of mine)?
  - ken 8y ago
    Microsoft, like most companies, don't use the internal implementation as part of the name brand. It was called "Windows" long before it got the current kernel. ("Edge" is switching engines, too, but not names.) I see no reason they'd change the Windows name even if they decided to switch out the kernel.

yakshaving_jgt 8y ago

Good riddance, though there is a somewhat masochistic pleasure in finding hacky solutions for old IE versions. I once figured out that IE7 can be tricked into understanding the :before and :after CSS pseudo-elements with this: .thing { *zoom: expression( this.runtimeStyle.zoom="1", this.insertBefore( document.createElement("i"), this.firstChild).className="ie-before" ); } .thing .ie-before { *zoom: expression(this.runtimeStyle['zoom'] = '1', this.innerHTML = '|'); }

sephoric 8y ago
How did you even figure that out? That sounds like it would take having IE's source code to figure out.
- Zalastax 8y ago
  It looks like fairly standard JS to me. I don't know where to read about it but there are some details on the deprecation blog article: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2008/10/16/ending-expressions/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2008/10/16/ending-expres...
  - richardwhiuk 8y ago
    That's CSS, with embedded JS, which is relatively non standard.
    - cstejerean 8y ago
      It’s very non-standard, it was IE only until they dropped it in IE8, but it was one of the features being abused to make up for other css features that IE6 or 7 lacked.
    - Zalastax 8y ago
      Sure, but my point still stands: figuring this out doesn't require arcane knowledge, contrary to what was suggested. The code inside the expression looks like standard JS. The downvotes and your reply suggests I should have communicated more clearly.

theodorejb 8y ago

Official announcement: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/Bringing-Internet-Explorer-11-to-Windows-Server-2012-and-Windows/ba-p/325297 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/B... > We will also publish the IE11 upgrade through Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) for all versions of Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8 Standard later this year. Nice! I wonder, will they eventually do this with their Chromium-based version of Edge?

talawahdotnet 8y ago
Yea I really am hoping their Chromium based browser gives them the combination of broad compatibility and enterprise integration needed bring about the end of IE 11.
untog 8y ago
I can't imagine they will ever push their Chromium reboot as a replacement for IE, it would break brittle intranet sites everywhere. Hopefully as a separate download, though.
- saidajigumi 8y ago
  It should be noted that Microsoft has a history of massive engineering investments in backwards-compatibility, esp. around Windows. I don't know that that's the case here, but there's certainly cultural and technical precedent.
WorldMaker 8y ago
Their blog posts claimed they are planning for a Windows 7+ version of Chromium-based Edge, and may explore cross-platform beyond Windows.

IdontRememberIt 8y ago

(I work for a company running a popular mainstream classified ad website in Europe) After some investigation (because we wanted to crush Google Analytics numbers), we found that +95% of our IE9 and IE10 trafic reported in GA is in fact from bots and proxied clients.

dccoolgai 8y ago
Just out of curiosity, can you describe broadly how you made that determination (I assume it was something more complex than just looking at the UA string?)
- IdontRememberIt 8y ago
  We started our journey by trying to understand why ie9 had higher figures than ie10. As we also have an analytics on the server side, we extracted a raw log. We used our existing tools that can filter "fake" or "foe" trafic by its behavior. We then manualy analyzed representative filtered samples (still by analyzing its behavior). It took some time, but was worth it, because we found an opposite conclusion than GA: most of the real traffic ($) from our ie9-10 samples is on ie10. So now the dev. guideline is: forget ie9 and make it not too ugly/broken on ie10. ;) PS: We had to do a manual work of filtering because our tools do not filter all the traffic that we know being fake or foe because we often have false positive.

ptyyy 8y ago

I read this as IE11 and got prematurely excited. Good news though.

Jaruzel 8y ago

IE as a browser does suck, no argument there. However, I (and I'm sure many other Windows devs too) find the .NET WebBrowser control very useful - it's a easy drop-in control that's part of the .NET framework. It shares a lot with with IE codebase, so if IE gets killed off, would that include the control? It certainly would no longer be updated. I've looked in depth at the embedded Chromium project, but there's simply TOO much baggage with that making it total overkill when all you want to do is render some HTML in a line-of-business application.

PretzelFisch 8y ago
There is a .net control now that lets you embed edge. The old IE control was annoying with it's default to ie7 impersonation mode that could only be controlled via registry settings
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Is there?! Is it part of the default framework, or do you have NuGet it? Yes... FEATURE_EMULATION reg key - I know it well ;)
  - PretzelFisch 8y ago
    WebView is a NuGet package https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern-webview-winforms-wpf-apps/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern-webvie...
Avery3R 8y ago
They're not going to kill off IE, it's the only browser on server/ltsb SKUs. They've said that edge is a no go for those because of how frequently edge gets updates compared to the os.
- babypuncher 8y ago
  Why they can't figure out how to update the browser independently of the OS is beyond comprehension. IE and Edge are the only non-evergreen browsers which is probably they are the most problematic to target. I develop primarily in Firefox, but I never have bugs pop up in Chromium or WebKit browsers, only IE and Edge.

piotrkubisa 8y ago

It sounds like this is the best time to fetch virtual machines from modern.ie [1] website. It is worth noting that IE is still used in many Point of Sales or other embedded devices. // Though I guess in most of scenarios it is IE6 for obvious reasons. [1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

mtmail 8y ago

I saw the beginning of the third Browser War was proclaimed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#Third_Browser_War:_2018-Present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#Third_Browser_War...

irrational 8y ago

If anyone is wondering about IE11, MS says "Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the version of Windows on which it is installed." Extended support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025. Extended support for Windows Server 2016 ends on January 11, 2027. Presumably one or those 2 dates could be considered the termination date for IE11. My company has chosen the 2025 date as when we will stop support for IE11 in our web pages/apps.

dak1 8y ago
6 more years is a really long time on the web. You may want to base it instead on usage metrics — IE, once usage drops below what % are you willing to stop testing against a browser? Win7 support is ending Jan 2020 also, at which point IE11 will only be supported on Win10 (and it's not default there). So that may be a good date to start considering ending IE11 support as well, especially with Chromium-Edge coming out later this year.
- aboutruby 8y ago
  If you are selling software to other companies. And out of thousands of companies, one of them bringing a significant percentage of revenue is using IEX, you may want to consider supporting IEX. It can also be useful for future contracts. Usage doesn't mean everything.
  - tatersolid 8y ago
    Seconded. Just try to run a B2B SaaS without supporting IE11. You will lose out on a ton of large-but-slow-moving customers. Like banks, insurance companies, etc. who all seem to have critical internal systems that only work on IE11 in compatibility mode.
    - TimTheTinker 8y ago
      This is why our company is still supporting IE11, and will be for some time to come. Personally, I'm hoping the app my team builds will be able to finally drop IE11 support once the new Chromium-based Edge app becomes available on Windows 7 and 8.

Jedd 8y ago

> Over the course of the northern hemisphere's spring ... A delightful phrasing that more northern hemisphere journalists would do well to adopt (slightly less constraining or cumbersome than actually specifying a date range, but infinitely preferable to the parochial 'season of year').

pixelpp 8y ago

RIP