4 ms·

When is IE gonna die? I'd really like to use flexbox/grid and other css/js niceties, but we still have 16% of users on IE. I know Microsoft is planning on suppo

by plopz 7y ago

When is IE gonna die? I'd really like to use flexbox/grid and other css/js niceties, but we still have 16% of users on IE. I know Microsoft is planning on supporting forever, but does anyone know if they are trying to move people off of it?

frandroid 7y ago
They are, it's IT departments and customer internal apps using IE-specific things like ActiveX which are keeping it alive.
- gsnedders 7y ago
  Note that Chromium based Edge contains "IE mode" (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode) as an attempt to get enterprises away from using IE on the open web (essentially, they can set "all intranet sites use IE" or "these domains use IE", but Edge will use Chromium on all other websites).
WorldMaker 7y ago
At some point you have to determine your ROI on those 16% of users and determine if the extra effort to avoid modern tools is worth it. It's not Microsoft keeping IE on life support in 2020, it's all the vendors putting in a lot of work (or worse, putting in no work, as stagnancy is its own problem) to keep 16% (or less) of their users happy.
- apatheticonion 7y ago
  How do we convince hospitals and medical clinics to use Chrome, Firefox or the latest edge browser?
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    The same way we convince any other industry? Don't provide new features to old browsers. Include the costs of doing business with older browsers accurately enough in your support contracts (especially don't undervalue your time, workarounds, polyfills, etc). Find ways to help your clients with upgrade assistance (are there IT contractors you can recommend to your clients that they might hire for short term upgrade projects, such as maybe helping them upgrade vendors who are possibly even your competitors?). And so forth, anything to better help your clients understand (and incentivize) not just the obvious security risks but the economic trade-offs in supporting older tools/languishing in the supposed "easy" status quo. I can't tell you where the magic ROI line is for you. Maybe you have to make the hard choices like "If we go this route [only evergreen browsers], we lose ~16% of our customers immediately, but we add X% feature/stability/maintenance improvements to our remaining ~84% customers, and hopefully one day we'll see at least some of those 16% come back to us the next time they get a chance to upgrade, likely in Y years." It's a business decision, and you don't always have to meet customers where "they are", you can make the tough calls and ask your customers to meet you in the middle. How angry that might make them, and how much business you might lose, is always going to be something you have to determine with your market in mind.
    - lvspiff 7y ago
      Its not just YOUR product though - its the entire suite of products that medical institutions use. Be it the EHR, the patient management, the radiology, the cardiology system - each one deals in IE11 instead of a more modern tech stack. So if you end up being the outlier your product is more than likely going to end up being cut in preference for something with fewer features even.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        It's certainly not an easy bootstrap problem (by way of a mexican standoff). It's possible many of those projects individually are just waiting for the first to take the first risk and move forward so the rest can just claim to be following someone else's lead. To badly mix metaphors: a rising tide floats all boats, it's just sometimes you have to be the first to remove your finger from the dyke to raise the tide. Like I said, it's always going to be a calculated risk, and I mentioned that losing customers is certainly a risk involved. Sometimes a small loss of customers is an acceptable risk. There are mitigations for such risks such as making sure that "fewer features" alternative is your own (at the right maintenance costs), but also including taking things to standards/regulatory boards. Using out-of-date software is a HIPAA risk and an ethics risk. There are ways to convince HIPAA enforcement auditors and/or groups like the AMA that it is too much of a risk, or too unethical a risk and that some sort of upgrade horizon should be spread across the industry. That's not easy either, but it's not impossible, and it's probably a good idea in general in the long run (the regularity with which Day-0 vulnerabilities are disclosed would give a lot of weight to the risks of falling behind on software upgrades, for instance).
  - erklik 7y ago
    Probably not very fun, but if the product wont work on IE, hospitals and medical clinics will be forced to move to the latest browsers i.e. purposefully hamper products on IE.
  - recursive 7y ago
    I'm working on a product that's directly targeting these customers. Just last week implementation had a call with a customer/potential customer about IE support. We just said no. They backed down.
  - xenadu02 7y ago
    I worked on an enterprise product in the 2010-2014 timeframe. We were a huge enterprise company that got acquired by an even larger one; all of our customers were on the Fortune 500. Our product supported IE7 at the time and let me tell you kids... that is trouble you've not known. I got so fed up I just said I wasn't going to look at IE7 bugs anymore and wasn't going to invest any time in it. My decision snowballed and eventually that snowball led to dropping IE7 support across the whole organization. It turns out everyone hated it. Sometimes you've just got to push for it and tell customers that's what you are doing whether they like it or not. We just told our Fortune 500 customer base IE7 support was dead, get over it. And they did.
d1zzy 7y ago
> When is IE gonna die? The year following the year of the Linux desktop!
some-guy 7y ago
Where I work, we have about 5-10 million unique daily user sessions accessing our SaaS application. About 40-45% of them use IE11. We have absolutely no choice in the matter and it has been made clear several times by our customers: IE11 support is paramount because upgrading their machines is an extremely expensive task.
- mr_toad 7y ago
  Is there a business equivalent of bad life choices? Because businesses that are stuck with IE have made the equivalent of bad life choices.
zdragnar 7y ago
Postcss with preset-env seemed to translate flexbox perfectly for me when I was supporting ie11. Babel does js translation acceptably as well. It would definitely be nice to not specifically need the extra tools, but for a big enough project it seems silly to not use them.

by plopz 7y ago

frandroid 7y ago

They are, it's IT departments and customer internal apps using IE-specific things like ActiveX which are keeping it alive.

gsnedders 7y ago
Note that Chromium based Edge contains "IE mode" (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode) as an attempt to get enterprises away from using IE on the open web (essentially, they can set "all intranet sites use IE" or "these domains use IE", but Edge will use Chromium on all other websites).

WorldMaker 7y ago

At some point you have to determine your ROI on those 16% of users and determine if the extra effort to avoid modern tools is worth it. It's not Microsoft keeping IE on life support in 2020, it's all the vendors putting in a lot of work (or worse, putting in no work, as stagnancy is its own problem) to keep 16% (or less) of their users happy.

apatheticonion 7y ago
How do we convince hospitals and medical clinics to use Chrome, Firefox or the latest edge browser?
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  The same way we convince any other industry? Don't provide new features to old browsers. Include the costs of doing business with older browsers accurately enough in your support contracts (especially don't undervalue your time, workarounds, polyfills, etc). Find ways to help your clients with upgrade assistance (are there IT contractors you can recommend to your clients that they might hire for short term upgrade projects, such as maybe helping them upgrade vendors who are possibly even your competitors?). And so forth, anything to better help your clients understand (and incentivize) not just the obvious security risks but the economic trade-offs in supporting older tools/languishing in the supposed "easy" status quo. I can't tell you where the magic ROI line is for you. Maybe you have to make the hard choices like "If we go this route [only evergreen browsers], we lose ~16% of our customers immediately, but we add X% feature/stability/maintenance improvements to our remaining ~84% customers, and hopefully one day we'll see at least some of those 16% come back to us the next time they get a chance to upgrade, likely in Y years." It's a business decision, and you don't always have to meet customers where "they are", you can make the tough calls and ask your customers to meet you in the middle. How angry that might make them, and how much business you might lose, is always going to be something you have to determine with your market in mind.
  - lvspiff 7y ago
    Its not just YOUR product though - its the entire suite of products that medical institutions use. Be it the EHR, the patient management, the radiology, the cardiology system - each one deals in IE11 instead of a more modern tech stack. So if you end up being the outlier your product is more than likely going to end up being cut in preference for something with fewer features even.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      It's certainly not an easy bootstrap problem (by way of a mexican standoff). It's possible many of those projects individually are just waiting for the first to take the first risk and move forward so the rest can just claim to be following someone else's lead. To badly mix metaphors: a rising tide floats all boats, it's just sometimes you have to be the first to remove your finger from the dyke to raise the tide. Like I said, it's always going to be a calculated risk, and I mentioned that losing customers is certainly a risk involved. Sometimes a small loss of customers is an acceptable risk. There are mitigations for such risks such as making sure that "fewer features" alternative is your own (at the right maintenance costs), but also including taking things to standards/regulatory boards. Using out-of-date software is a HIPAA risk and an ethics risk. There are ways to convince HIPAA enforcement auditors and/or groups like the AMA that it is too much of a risk, or too unethical a risk and that some sort of upgrade horizon should be spread across the industry. That's not easy either, but it's not impossible, and it's probably a good idea in general in the long run (the regularity with which Day-0 vulnerabilities are disclosed would give a lot of weight to the risks of falling behind on software upgrades, for instance).
- erklik 7y ago
  Probably not very fun, but if the product wont work on IE, hospitals and medical clinics will be forced to move to the latest browsers i.e. purposefully hamper products on IE.
- recursive 7y ago
  I'm working on a product that's directly targeting these customers. Just last week implementation had a call with a customer/potential customer about IE support. We just said no. They backed down.
- xenadu02 7y ago
  I worked on an enterprise product in the 2010-2014 timeframe. We were a huge enterprise company that got acquired by an even larger one; all of our customers were on the Fortune 500. Our product supported IE7 at the time and let me tell you kids... that is trouble you've not known. I got so fed up I just said I wasn't going to look at IE7 bugs anymore and wasn't going to invest any time in it. My decision snowballed and eventually that snowball led to dropping IE7 support across the whole organization. It turns out everyone hated it. Sometimes you've just got to push for it and tell customers that's what you are doing whether they like it or not. We just told our Fortune 500 customer base IE7 support was dead, get over it. And they did.

d1zzy 7y ago

> When is IE gonna die? The year following the year of the Linux desktop!

some-guy 7y ago

Where I work, we have about 5-10 million unique daily user sessions accessing our SaaS application. About 40-45% of them use IE11. We have absolutely no choice in the matter and it has been made clear several times by our customers: IE11 support is paramount because upgrading their machines is an extremely expensive task.

mr_toad 7y ago
Is there a business equivalent of bad life choices? Because businesses that are stuck with IE have made the equivalent of bad life choices.

zdragnar 7y ago

Postcss with preset-env seemed to translate flexbox perfectly for me when I was supporting ie11. Babel does js translation acceptably as well. It would definitely be nice to not specifically need the extra tools, but for a big enough project it seems silly to not use them.