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Is flexbox support sufficiently wide now for public services to adopt it? Or does it rely on good fallbacks?

lucideer 8y ago
Flexbox support is at 98.59% of global users according to[0] (so probably significantly higher for the US). [0] https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox
- legostormtroopr 8y ago
  98.59% of general users may not be 98.59% of users in government agencies which is a problem. A lot of users in government agencies are still using Internet Explorer, which makes this question important depending on the audience. If you are building websites for users of government services its probably ok, if you are building websites for employees of government sites you might have problems.
  - lithos 8y ago
    When I was in the military many "trouble shooting" steps for using training portals and similar included step by step guides for how to downgrade Internet Explorer to older versions. I'm sure with edge around they include steps for how to even find the old Internet Explorer browser on your system.
  - lucideer 8y ago
    Believe it or not, Internet Explorer does support flexbox: both the latest version, and the version before. There may be more IE users using government sites (whether they be gov employees forced to leverage it for ancient intranet use, or just some older users), but hopefully the number of those on IE <10 will still be extremely small. Global usage for IE <10 is ~0.3%, which includes many users in Asia forced to use IE for ActiveX banking; again, one would hope this figure would be far far lower in the US. The bulk of that 1.4% of global users without flexbox support are actually more likely to be on an old version of iOS Safari or pre-Chrome Android Browser, than on IE, and desktop would be a larger-than-elsewhere demographic within older users of gov sites, and within gov employees on gov workstations, so in reality the flexbox support stats could well be above average for gov sites.
chmod775 8y ago
There are polyfills in JS available, if you really want to target IE10 and lower.
charliepark 8y ago
They have some really impressive documentation in this project. It's really great. They go over their browser support here: https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/ "We’ve designed the Design System to support older and newer browsers through progressive enhancement. The current major version of the Design System (1.0) is designed to support the newest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 9 and up. The next major release (2.0) will follow the 2% rule: we will officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov. Currently, this means that the Design System version 2.0 will support the newest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 11 and up."

Flexbox support is at 98.59% of global users according to[0] (so probably significantly higher for the US). [0] https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox

legostormtroopr 8y ago
98.59% of general users may not be 98.59% of users in government agencies which is a problem. A lot of users in government agencies are still using Internet Explorer, which makes this question important depending on the audience. If you are building websites for users of government services its probably ok, if you are building websites for employees of government sites you might have problems.
- lithos 8y ago
  When I was in the military many "trouble shooting" steps for using training portals and similar included step by step guides for how to downgrade Internet Explorer to older versions. I'm sure with edge around they include steps for how to even find the old Internet Explorer browser on your system.
- lucideer 8y ago
  Believe it or not, Internet Explorer does support flexbox: both the latest version, and the version before. There may be more IE users using government sites (whether they be gov employees forced to leverage it for ancient intranet use, or just some older users), but hopefully the number of those on IE <10 will still be extremely small. Global usage for IE <10 is ~0.3%, which includes many users in Asia forced to use IE for ActiveX banking; again, one would hope this figure would be far far lower in the US. The bulk of that 1.4% of global users without flexbox support are actually more likely to be on an old version of iOS Safari or pre-Chrome Android Browser, than on IE, and desktop would be a larger-than-elsewhere demographic within older users of gov sites, and within gov employees on gov workstations, so in reality the flexbox support stats could well be above average for gov sites.

chmod775 8y ago

There are polyfills in JS available, if you really want to target IE10 and lower.

charliepark 8y ago

They have some really impressive documentation in this project. It's really great. They go over their browser support here: https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/ "We’ve designed the Design System to support older and newer browsers through progressive enhancement. The current major version of the Design System (1.0) is designed to support the newest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 9 and up. The next major release (2.0) will follow the 2% rule: we will officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov. Currently, this means that the Design System version 2.0 will support the newest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 11 and up."