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Bootstrap v5: drop Internet Explorer support

408 points by zaiste 7y ago

sjroot 7y ago
I despise the fact that IE11 is still used, but it’s used by a quarter of our users at the large company I work at. We don’t use Bootstrap, but hopefully this encourages the companies that do use it to usher their users to something more modern and secure.
- Phylter 7y ago
  What made the change for us is libraries dropping support and us having to upgrade those libraries to be in compliance with our security audits. It's a good thing and more libraries need to force the issue. We were almost forced to find another library or write our own but we were able to find articles where Microsoft had said publicly that they no longer consider IE11 a browser and it shouldn't be used. It saved our hides.
- uk_programmer 7y ago
  I don't very much whether this will make much of a difference. Most devs very rarely ever upgrade the version of boostrap once it is in place, on intranet sites. One of the sites my friend supports is built in bootstrap 2. Typically if 25% of my users use IE11, I will just make sure it works with IE11. If I have to stay use an older version of the library I will just use that unless I can polyfill or patch the lib to work with older versions of IE. Then again I am kinda strange in the fact that if it should work in an old browser (and time permitting) I will normally make sure it works well enough that it is functional in that browser.
  - jayflux 7y ago
    > Most devs very rarely ever upgrade the version of boostrap once it is in place I think that’s the point. Those who want IE 11 support will stick with 4, whilst those who want the latest can upgrade to 5.
- H1Supreme 7y ago
  Are those users forced to use it? Or is it by choice. I spearheaded an effort at my org to restrict access to IE on all PC's that didn't absolutely need it. Which, turned out to be nearly everyone. Unfortunately, lots of users (mostly older) still associate the internet with "Internet Explorer". Simply telling them to use Chrome or Firefox solved the issue in a lot of cases.
- mekkkkkk 7y ago
  Never underestimate an IT departments ability to not give a fuck. I once got a bug report from a colleague complaining about our website not working in Firefox. I couldn't reproduce it locally, so I got to her computer and realized that Firefox updates (?!) had been blocked. Everyone in that department was stuck on Firefox 12, when the current version was 60+. Turns out that not even evergreen browsers are safe from overzealous policies. And this was on a pretty big media company with a large digital footprint.
  - thoraway1010 7y ago
    At least govt side sometimes the staff either don't know or don't have a budget so once something works they've learned to absolutely lock everything down has hard as they can so it can't be messed up. This is partly because vendors willing to deal with a govt procurement cycle often are selling total junk (for high prices).
  - nikanj 7y ago
    Some crucial thing was broken on Firefox 13, so they blocked the autoupdate. Nobody ever opened a ticket about re-checking if it's still broken on Firefox 14..
mleland 7y ago
I feel like the projects that rely on bootstrap are ones that have a larger IE audience. I hate supporting IE, but that has always been the appeal of bootstrap for me.
- czechdeveloper 7y ago
  You can remain using older versions then. But they can't really stay relevant and keep supporting IE.
  - tpetry 7y ago
    Why? Their plan for bootstrap v5 at the moment is just some cleanup to fix mistakes they made and remove the jquery dependency. I dont see the reason for these goals to not support ie11. As much as i hate ie11 we have to still support it as its used in many businesses using our softwares
    - thawaway1837 7y ago
      I think it makes sense to formally drop the IE dependency in versions sooner than when you’re making changes that actually break IE. Besides, replacing jquery May indeed be why they chose to drop IE right now. One of the biggest selling points of jquery, and one of the biggest contributors to its heaviness, is cross browser support including IE. As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach.
      - uk_programmer 7y ago
        > As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach. Array.prototype.forEach is supported from IE9. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/forEach#Browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... EDIT: It is the nodelist api that isn't supported in IE. Not Array.prototype.forEach. Quite a lot of these basic JS constructs even if they are missing (most aren't in IE11) are very easily polyfilled. Personally I think it is fine that they drop support if they don't feel the need to support it. Bootstrap 4 isn't going to vanish.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Is it going to be completely broken / inoperable or just "not quite perfect"?
- dstroot 7y ago
  This is the right question to ask. The majority of Bootstrap should work fine.
- Joeri 7y ago
  I assume they’ll want to use css variables, so probably it will be completely broken.
- Etheryte 7y ago
  Reading through the changeset[1], this isn't a minor "some styles out of line" update, they're removing a number of polyfills that were there to only serve IE11 that affect many of their core components. Without testing it out, I would expect most components that use Javascript for functional enhancements to be broken. Most of the style changes are fairly minor and nothing you couldn't fix as you go, but the script changes are breaking changes. [1] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/30377/files https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/30377/files
eddywebs 7y ago
IE has become a tech debt that often corporations running an enterprise web app older than 10 years have to bear. I have clients who's web applications refuse to work on Chrome/Firefox and mandates the use of IE11 for proper functioning.
7777fps 7y ago
IE 11 is still supported by Microsoft because it is tied to Windows 10 support. If you're B2C you can probably ignore that and just not support it, but if you're B2B where you're selling not to users it's very hard to get away from supporting IE11. If your users never directly interact with you (for example you sell white-label software which gets resold) then you just can't control your end-user tech stack enough. If you're selling to partners who sell to companies who push out logins to their customers or user base then even if <1% of users use IE 11, that becomes 5% of companies having a user with it, which becomes 30% of the partners who are asking for IE11 support. It's one thing to turn down 1% of users it's quite another to annoy 30% of your income stream. As long as bootstrap 4 is supported (and the legacy bootstrap 3 support suggests it will be) then this doesn't have to be a problem of course, just one more thing to be aware of.
- wil421 7y ago
  Somehow the large FinTech company I work for dropped support for IE 11 and just asked employees to use Chrome. Even users still on Windows 7. We run a few customer portals and a customer facing ticketing system. Until now I’ve never been able to rid myself of IE 11. It’s very nice. Small banks aren’t so happy.
  - zihotki 7y ago
    It's just your large FinTech company probably doesn't have goverment contracts and/or huge enterprises as clients.
    - acdha 7y ago
      Or they’ve been successful in marketing this as a security requirement. That carries a lot of weight in .gov and anything involving finance, medical data, FERPA, etc. has a pretty solid argument for pushing secure clients since it’s free and easy.
    - nailer 7y ago
      Friend is in one the top 3 law firms in the world. They have a corporate Chrome rollout, since at least one of their web apps requires a current browser.
fortyseven 7y ago
I wonder how many of these ancient legacy systems are content to stay on IE because everyone coddles them with support? Chicken and the egg kind of thing. Why invest the time and money to modernize if devs will bend over backwards to keep them on life support?
- efdee 7y ago
  Not sure. At least in my experience, the people demanding that their apps keep working on IE11 are not the people who care about what framework we use to build the apps.
- beart 7y ago
  More likely it's because no one wants to pay to upgrade the hundreds of barely supported in-house apps their company has that only run on IE 11 in compatibility mode.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    The people making the decision judge their personal risk to be higher if they initiate the change than if they stick with the status quo, even with the chance that it causes a major breach—they might not get blamed for that, anyway. Same as most business decisions.
- wstuartcl 7y ago
  It depends on your user base. Sometimes you must coddle because the users are still high on your active user reports and not supporting them is a choice between killing off that user base or keeping them. For instance if your business model is to sell to/support highly regulated industries or govt users you are effectively forced to support their current user base configs or lose that share of the market because the choice for them is deal with a huge change to their requirements and support (which move at a glacial rate) OR chose a different vendor for your provided service.
- sebazzz 7y ago
  Especially because the ones to make that call may not know that their business apps support other web browsers. We sell some tools, which also work on IE11 but definitely on other web browsers. Do our clients know that? I wouldn't know, and wouldn't count on it.
jgalt212 7y ago
IE 11 legacy support is a dream compared to having to support IE 8 and lower back in the day. The JS engine on IE 9 was about 10X faster than the one on IE 8.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  I remember thinking "Once IE6 is dead I'll never complain about browsers again". IE11 is still pretty fantastic compared to IE6.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Well, IE 9 was the first version to have JIT suppport.
rado 7y ago
A progressively enhanced site should work fine in text mode on IE11.
- toastal 7y ago
  Maybe for some CSS sure, but there's so much has happened in the realm of web APIs and JavaScript that certain things are nearly impossible.
KarlKemp 7y ago
Bootstrap needs a modern browser, but modern browsers don’t need bootstrap. Seriously: 90% of the value of bootstrap was homogenizing browsers and making horizontal positioning easier. Both these issues have improved dramatically, with browsers converging and CSS Grid becoming available, respectively. At this time, bootstrap offers little more than a somewhat more opinionated set of margins and other defaults than what browsers ship with, plus some higher-level components.
- rchaud 7y ago
  This has less to do with "modern browsers" and more with how the site was designed and the opportunity cost of switching. Why would the developers of a Bootstrap-based site that works fine overhaul it completely for CSS Grid, which has far less backwards compatibility? What would be the benefit? Bootstrap is more than just a layout grid, it's also a UI framework, so abandoning it would mess up things like tabs, accordions, modals, etc. Using Bootstrap isn't going to make your site less accessible or less secure. https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid
  - _ZeD_ 7y ago
    > Using Bootstrap isn't going to make your site less accessible or less secure. the same could be said for jQuery, still less and less people are using it
    - rchaud 7y ago
      Using vanilla JS instead of jQuery doesn't require refactoring the site's layout and changing every page template. And even then, a decision like that wouldn't be made unless there were significant QoL improvements in terms of site speed or maintainability. That is why BS5 can afford to drop jQuery as a dependency. Developers working on highly performant apps where ops/second matters would already be using vanilla JS, and that's what BS5 is trying to support with this; jQuery doesn't play well with React/Vue after all. But devs that are working on CMS-style websites, which make up the majority of actual websites on the internet, can continue to use jQuery if they want to.
drinchev 7y ago
I'm even not sure what an average experience on IE11 would be for any users. I push as much as I can to POs / stakeholders to just disable non-critical features on IE11 and just leave the basic functionality. I doubt anyone using IE11 likes that fact, so sounds good to give them just another reason to complain about their experience to their superiors. I will definitely never see "The product that just works on IE11" as a slogan, so being competitive in this won't be reasonable argument.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Ha, my office's intranet is MS SharePoint, the menu is broken in Chrome. I sent them the CSS to fix it (unnecessary divs are added, you just need the right selector and you can display:none them all) ... worked fine in IE11, apparently that's justification for a WONTFIX (fixed it for myself with uBlock). Lots of emails come around saying use/don't use IE11 for this operation because half the time it doesn't work, and half the time the sites being linked aren't standards compliant. As an ex webdev it's hard not to be annoyed.
baccredited 7y ago
I have access to analytics for a big government site. 11% of all traffic in March 2020 was IE11.
- tzs 7y ago
  I have access to order processing logs from a small site whose customers use Windows and who are generally not very technical. Of people who actually order: 36% Chrome 26% Edge 19% Firefox 19% IE11
  - e12e 7y ago
    No problem. If you drop support for ie11, those stats become: Of people who actually order: 44% Chrome 32% Edge 23% Firefox Unfortunately total orders will drop...
Raed667 7y ago
The only reason we still "support" IE11 in my company is that a "significant" number of our users visit us in their working-hours from IE11. During the weekend this kind of traffic drops significantly, which means to me that people using IE have to, and not choose to.
maelito 7y ago
Don't forget the fact that some (how much ?) users visit websites with IE because it's the default browser on their entreprise setup, but admins have installed Firefox alongside for compatibility with modern websites. So dropping IE is almost a service for them. Source : french administration with thousands of employees.
lazyjones 7y ago
What are some good alternatives for developers who don't want to lose 2,39% (or whatever the current MSIE11 market share is) of their visitors/revenue? Bulma claims 90% compatibility with IE11 at least. Foundation 6 seems to support IE9+.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  Market share != revenue share.
  - jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
    Exactly. In fact, for some domains, supporting IE11 can mean losing money. There is the technical cost, but also the support cost which tends to be higher.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Market share != revenue share. This can certainly be true. The amount of revenue my company generates from IE11 users is at least an order of magnitude more than its Chrome, Firefox, and Safari users combined.
- purerandomness 7y ago
  Just continue using the 4.x branch, it's perfectly fine and I think it's still going to receive maintenance for some time.
- tln 7y ago
  Those ie11 users may be able to just fire up chrome etc when they need to. That is my recent experience at least We build an IE compatible marketing and sign up flow, so I may only be seeing the motivated users' behavior
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > Those ie11 users may be able to just fire up chrome etc when they need to. They may. They may also just hit the back button. One of those actions requires much less inertia than the other.
darekkay 7y ago
Even StackOverflow dropped IE11 support recently [1], mainly to be able to use CSS custom properties in their Dark Theme implementation. [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/31/building-dark-mode-on-stack-overflow/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/31/building-dark-mode-on-...
- aesyondu 7y ago
  It makes sense when we assume that StackOverflow's audience are those who know enough not to use IE11.
websitescenes 7y ago
Good lord, looks like I’ll have to wait a few years to use this update then. We have a decent amount of legacy browser users that need support. Wish that Bootstrap supported these still widely used browsers. Had the same problem with v4.
- dangus 7y ago
  “Need” support, until you just force them to not need it. Like how YouTube basically killed off IE6: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-internet-explorer-6-kill-plot-engineer https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in... As long as people don’t have a reason to change, they won’t. I say you drop support now and consider yourselves lucky that you can ditch your more difficult and problematic customers. I mean, of course, I know this isn’t a realistic course of action for everyone. But I wish it was.
  - joshuaissac 7y ago
    It is usually the difficult and problematic enterprise customers using IE11 that also pay the most money. The choice between ditching customers and ditching a framework is not usually difficult.
    - websitescenes 7y ago
      Agreed, keeping your customers supported is #1 priority. This is a super hard lesson for many new engineers as they always want to use the latest and greatest bleeding edge tech. Unfortunately that want rarely aligns with the businesses needs.
strenholme 7y ago
I make sure my website is still 100% functional in IE11: Using only .jpg and .png (I don’t use .gif on my website) for images; not using too much Javascript; using .woff instead of .woff2 webfonts; text-shadow instead of text-stroke to give one font an outline look; etc. If I was building a node website which depended on a bunch of packages from developers who may or may not care about IE11, this would not be possible. But since I’ve done the entire design by hand with HTML and CSS for over a decade, I can keep it IE11 compatible without issue. Also, everything works if Javascript is turned off, and there are reasonable (if not great) fallback fonts for users who disable webfonts.
- untog 7y ago
  The second half of what you're saying is just standard web development practise. And as for the rest... everyone has to make a judgement call. Do you still support IE8? Presumably not. As the percentage of users with a browser drops the amount of development work required to support it means you drop it. For a lot of us the number of IE11 users (< 1%) means it simply isn't worth the time. (also, please let's cut it out with the "young developers" stuff. I've been around long enough to see lazy developers both young and old.)
  - strenholme 7y ago
    To answer your question: My site still works in IE8, but with minimal CSS. It works in IE7 and IE6 with, albeit without CSS (except for my online resume), so it gracefully degrades. I have been phasing out IE8 support through the 2010s; in 2012 I went to a lot of effort to make everything look nice in IE8 but phased out that work as I updated the site. It’s also perfectly readable in browsers without CSS and Javascript, including Lynx. Dillo and Netsurf both have CSS implementations so broken, some versions of those browsers have rendering issues unless they disable CSS. It is possible to make a website which renders in Lynx, which is perfectly readable in IE6, which can be read in a browser without CSS or Javascript.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
jmull 7y ago
Well, this is a mistake. Nobody likes to support IE11 but dropping support moves Bootstrap 5 from "just use Bootstrap" to "Bootstrap has tricky pitfalls". Before someone can use Bootstrap 5 they need to be sure and confident that they don't need IE11 and never will.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  IE11 was supplanted by Edge years ago. Windows 10 ships with Edge preinstalled (it comes with both, but you're not stuck with IE). Windows 7 and older are no longer supported by MS. The only in-between is Windows 8 which everyone hated so I doubt it has a huge market share, especially in enterprises which are the only ones who might be "stuck" with the browsers that come preinstalled on the OS.
  - x3haloed 7y ago
    Unfortunately, the enterprise world is still making extensive use of IE11. Here is the browser breakdown on an enterprise application I work on: https://i.postimg.cc/cCbk34SR/Screenshot-20200407-083321.png https://i.postimg.cc/cCbk34SR/Screenshot-20200407-083321.png As of now, Bootstrap 5 cannot be considered for use in any website with heavy use from enterprise users. Edit: though it is nice to see that Chromium Edge is already catching up to Spartan Edge!
    - speedgoose 7y ago
      It depends. At work we decided to not support IE11 for a product and all the users understand that they need to use something else than IE. So the breakdown is pretty much 0% for IE. It's another story if you are selling, but if the users must use your application, they will click on the other blue e icon.
      - x3haloed 7y ago
        Unless of course the "other" blue E icon is unavailable because they are on Windows 7 without administrative rights to install Chromium Edge, or Edge has been flat out disabled through group policy. https://i.postimg.cc/FzBj9Ttp/Screenshot-20200407-084447.png https://i.postimg.cc/FzBj9Ttp/Screenshot-20200407-084447.png
soperj 7y ago
FINALLY!
leejoramo 7y ago
What is the the expected release date for Bootstrap 5. Being that it is still an early Alpha, this change may not have a significant impact for a while.
tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Microsoft (or a third party) needs to do this: I. Rename IE11 something like "MS ActiveX Runtime For LOB Network Apps" (AXR for short) or something like "MS ActiveX Player". II. Create an MMC console entitled "AXR Domain Manager" that identifies a list of domains that open in AXR instead of the default browser. This list is controllable via group policy and other MS management tools. III. Modify IE where if a website not in the aforementioned list is accessed, a popup saying "This site will be opened in your default browser" appears and the link opens up in the default browser. It would make it so much easier to explain to non-technical people that IE11 is really a legacy app engine at this point and shouldn't be used for modern website usage.
- acdha 7y ago
  Isn't that basically what Enterprise Mode does? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-to-improve-compatibility https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-... > If you have specific websites and apps that have compatibility problems with Microsoft Edge, you can use the Enterprise Mode site list so that the websites open in Internet Explorer 11 automatically. Additionally, if you know that your intranet sites aren't going to work correctly with Microsoft Edge, you can set all intranet sites to automatically open using IE11 with the Send all intranet sites to IE group policy.
  - amanzi 7y ago
    Yes - that's exactly what it does!
  - int_19h 7y ago
    I think the point is to do the reverse - if somebody does run IE11 directly (rather than Edge), and tries to open a website that is not in the system-wide whitelist, it forces them to use Edge.
cfv 7y ago
As a provider, supporting old tech stacks sucks. They're clunky, have all kinds of warts and annoying workarounds for stuff that got improved in future versions. As a consumer, being told my light bulbs won't work with the new fixture is a great reason to no longer work with that provider. As a provider that knows this, I'd rather support the old tech stack right up to the point my ability to keep the lights on isn't at risk.
- zimmund 7y ago
  At this point supporting IE is like making light fixtures that support candles as well.
tcd 7y ago
It seems IE11 has become the new Python 2.7. I can only hope one day MS decides to pull the plug entirely, it can't run any new JS features and is clinging onto life. Eventually, the web will just break (for example, http/3), and IE will be forced to retire. We just need the "right" pieces to break before it can retire in peace.
vinniejames 7y ago
This sounds like a terrible idea. Most of the reason to use a framework like Bootstrap is to avoid dealing with cross browser issues, looking at you IE
wnevets 7y ago
I would love to drop IE11 support but its still generates way too much revenue. V5 won't be an option until that changes.
0xff00ffee 7y ago
There are still companies in Europe I work with that use IE11. Since we switched from jQuery to Vue last year, we put a friendly reminder on each page saying IE11 is not supported (since its ES6 support sucks), but the tickets still came in. Finally we installed a header on all B2B sites that pops a modal error saying please don't use IE11. The tickets stopped abruptly. I was expecting complaints, but the majority of them already have alt browsers installed, so instead of asking, in this case forcing them to use a different browser worked much better.
- e12e 7y ago
  Won't this be great when Google and everyone else kills off the user agent header? 5 years from now, there'll be no forcing/detecting users with old ipads, chromebooks or phones.
  - bepvte 7y ago
    You should reread that article
    - e12e 7y ago
      Hmm, valid point. https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-hints/ https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-hints/
  - jannes 7y ago
    Does it matter that newer browser versions are freezing the user agent? Microsoft will never remove it from IE11, so you can always detect IE to show a modal popup.
jakearmitage 7y ago
Are there any frameworks like this that support IE10 or IE11?
lanius 7y ago
Small world, the committer is one of the main contributors to MPC-HC (RIP)
k__ 7y ago
Somehow Bootstrap became the jQuery of CSS for me. I used it excessively 6 years ago. Then the v4 took an eternity to release and I already switched to different solutions. I would have thought that people that are still using it are doing so because of legacy support.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
  Which solutions?
ativzzz 7y ago
Why aren't IE users considered more when thinking about accessibility? The best practice is to incorporate a11y accessibility standards to accommodate the small percentage of users who use screen readers and/or have color blindness/other disabilities. Why are we so quick to drop IE11 support when supporting users with disabilities is just as much work if not more? And possibly are a smaller percentage of users than IE users? You'll never read "Bootstrap stops supporting screen readers and removes aria tags in v6". By extension, can we classify IE usage as a disability? Only half joking: I imagine a lot of current IE users are either doing it because of work or because they are technologically illiterate.
- bfred_it 7y ago
  Disability isn’t a choice

408 points by zaiste 7y ago

I despise the fact that IE11 is still used, but it’s used by a quarter of our users at the large company I work at. We don’t use Bootstrap, but hopefully this encourages the companies that do use it to usher their users to something more modern and secure.

Phylter 7y ago
What made the change for us is libraries dropping support and us having to upgrade those libraries to be in compliance with our security audits. It's a good thing and more libraries need to force the issue. We were almost forced to find another library or write our own but we were able to find articles where Microsoft had said publicly that they no longer consider IE11 a browser and it shouldn't be used. It saved our hides.
uk_programmer 7y ago
I don't very much whether this will make much of a difference. Most devs very rarely ever upgrade the version of boostrap once it is in place, on intranet sites. One of the sites my friend supports is built in bootstrap 2. Typically if 25% of my users use IE11, I will just make sure it works with IE11. If I have to stay use an older version of the library I will just use that unless I can polyfill or patch the lib to work with older versions of IE. Then again I am kinda strange in the fact that if it should work in an old browser (and time permitting) I will normally make sure it works well enough that it is functional in that browser.
- jayflux 7y ago
  > Most devs very rarely ever upgrade the version of boostrap once it is in place I think that’s the point. Those who want IE 11 support will stick with 4, whilst those who want the latest can upgrade to 5.
H1Supreme 7y ago
Are those users forced to use it? Or is it by choice. I spearheaded an effort at my org to restrict access to IE on all PC's that didn't absolutely need it. Which, turned out to be nearly everyone. Unfortunately, lots of users (mostly older) still associate the internet with "Internet Explorer". Simply telling them to use Chrome or Firefox solved the issue in a lot of cases.
mekkkkkk 7y ago
Never underestimate an IT departments ability to not give a fuck. I once got a bug report from a colleague complaining about our website not working in Firefox. I couldn't reproduce it locally, so I got to her computer and realized that Firefox updates (?!) had been blocked. Everyone in that department was stuck on Firefox 12, when the current version was 60+. Turns out that not even evergreen browsers are safe from overzealous policies. And this was on a pretty big media company with a large digital footprint.
- thoraway1010 7y ago
  At least govt side sometimes the staff either don't know or don't have a budget so once something works they've learned to absolutely lock everything down has hard as they can so it can't be messed up. This is partly because vendors willing to deal with a govt procurement cycle often are selling total junk (for high prices).
- nikanj 7y ago
  Some crucial thing was broken on Firefox 13, so they blocked the autoupdate. Nobody ever opened a ticket about re-checking if it's still broken on Firefox 14..

mleland 7y ago

I feel like the projects that rely on bootstrap are ones that have a larger IE audience. I hate supporting IE, but that has always been the appeal of bootstrap for me.

czechdeveloper 7y ago
You can remain using older versions then. But they can't really stay relevant and keep supporting IE.
- tpetry 7y ago
  Why? Their plan for bootstrap v5 at the moment is just some cleanup to fix mistakes they made and remove the jquery dependency. I dont see the reason for these goals to not support ie11. As much as i hate ie11 we have to still support it as its used in many businesses using our softwares
  - thawaway1837 7y ago
    I think it makes sense to formally drop the IE dependency in versions sooner than when you’re making changes that actually break IE. Besides, replacing jquery May indeed be why they chose to drop IE right now. One of the biggest selling points of jquery, and one of the biggest contributors to its heaviness, is cross browser support including IE. As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach.
    - uk_programmer 7y ago
      > As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach. Array.prototype.forEach is supported from IE9. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/forEach#Browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... EDIT: It is the nodelist api that isn't supported in IE. Not Array.prototype.forEach. Quite a lot of these basic JS constructs even if they are missing (most aren't in IE11) are very easily polyfilled. Personally I think it is fine that they drop support if they don't feel the need to support it. Bootstrap 4 isn't going to vanish.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

Is it going to be completely broken / inoperable or just "not quite perfect"?

dstroot 7y ago
This is the right question to ask. The majority of Bootstrap should work fine.
Joeri 7y ago
I assume they’ll want to use css variables, so probably it will be completely broken.
Etheryte 7y ago
Reading through the changeset[1], this isn't a minor "some styles out of line" update, they're removing a number of polyfills that were there to only serve IE11 that affect many of their core components. Without testing it out, I would expect most components that use Javascript for functional enhancements to be broken. Most of the style changes are fairly minor and nothing you couldn't fix as you go, but the script changes are breaking changes. [1] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/30377/files https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/30377/files

eddywebs 7y ago

IE has become a tech debt that often corporations running an enterprise web app older than 10 years have to bear. I have clients who's web applications refuse to work on Chrome/Firefox and mandates the use of IE11 for proper functioning.

7777fps 7y ago

IE 11 is still supported by Microsoft because it is tied to Windows 10 support. If you're B2C you can probably ignore that and just not support it, but if you're B2B where you're selling not to users it's very hard to get away from supporting IE11. If your users never directly interact with you (for example you sell white-label software which gets resold) then you just can't control your end-user tech stack enough. If you're selling to partners who sell to companies who push out logins to their customers or user base then even if <1% of users use IE 11, that becomes 5% of companies having a user with it, which becomes 30% of the partners who are asking for IE11 support. It's one thing to turn down 1% of users it's quite another to annoy 30% of your income stream. As long as bootstrap 4 is supported (and the legacy bootstrap 3 support suggests it will be) then this doesn't have to be a problem of course, just one more thing to be aware of.

wil421 7y ago
Somehow the large FinTech company I work for dropped support for IE 11 and just asked employees to use Chrome. Even users still on Windows 7. We run a few customer portals and a customer facing ticketing system. Until now I’ve never been able to rid myself of IE 11. It’s very nice. Small banks aren’t so happy.
- zihotki 7y ago
  It's just your large FinTech company probably doesn't have goverment contracts and/or huge enterprises as clients.
  - acdha 7y ago
    Or they’ve been successful in marketing this as a security requirement. That carries a lot of weight in .gov and anything involving finance, medical data, FERPA, etc. has a pretty solid argument for pushing secure clients since it’s free and easy.
  - nailer 7y ago
    Friend is in one the top 3 law firms in the world. They have a corporate Chrome rollout, since at least one of their web apps requires a current browser.

fortyseven 7y ago

I wonder how many of these ancient legacy systems are content to stay on IE because everyone coddles them with support? Chicken and the egg kind of thing. Why invest the time and money to modernize if devs will bend over backwards to keep them on life support?

efdee 7y ago
Not sure. At least in my experience, the people demanding that their apps keep working on IE11 are not the people who care about what framework we use to build the apps.
beart 7y ago
More likely it's because no one wants to pay to upgrade the hundreds of barely supported in-house apps their company has that only run on IE 11 in compatibility mode.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  The people making the decision judge their personal risk to be higher if they initiate the change than if they stick with the status quo, even with the chance that it causes a major breach—they might not get blamed for that, anyway. Same as most business decisions.
wstuartcl 7y ago
It depends on your user base. Sometimes you must coddle because the users are still high on your active user reports and not supporting them is a choice between killing off that user base or keeping them. For instance if your business model is to sell to/support highly regulated industries or govt users you are effectively forced to support their current user base configs or lose that share of the market because the choice for them is deal with a huge change to their requirements and support (which move at a glacial rate) OR chose a different vendor for your provided service.
sebazzz 7y ago
Especially because the ones to make that call may not know that their business apps support other web browsers. We sell some tools, which also work on IE11 but definitely on other web browsers. Do our clients know that? I wouldn't know, and wouldn't count on it.

jgalt212 7y ago

IE 11 legacy support is a dream compared to having to support IE 8 and lower back in the day. The JS engine on IE 9 was about 10X faster than the one on IE 8.

alkonaut 7y ago
I remember thinking "Once IE6 is dead I'll never complain about browsers again". IE11 is still pretty fantastic compared to IE6.
pjmlp 7y ago
Well, IE 9 was the first version to have JIT suppport.

rado 7y ago

A progressively enhanced site should work fine in text mode on IE11.

toastal 7y ago
Maybe for some CSS sure, but there's so much has happened in the realm of web APIs and JavaScript that certain things are nearly impossible.

KarlKemp 7y ago

Bootstrap needs a modern browser, but modern browsers don’t need bootstrap. Seriously: 90% of the value of bootstrap was homogenizing browsers and making horizontal positioning easier. Both these issues have improved dramatically, with browsers converging and CSS Grid becoming available, respectively. At this time, bootstrap offers little more than a somewhat more opinionated set of margins and other defaults than what browsers ship with, plus some higher-level components.

rchaud 7y ago
This has less to do with "modern browsers" and more with how the site was designed and the opportunity cost of switching. Why would the developers of a Bootstrap-based site that works fine overhaul it completely for CSS Grid, which has far less backwards compatibility? What would be the benefit? Bootstrap is more than just a layout grid, it's also a UI framework, so abandoning it would mess up things like tabs, accordions, modals, etc. Using Bootstrap isn't going to make your site less accessible or less secure. https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid
- _ZeD_ 7y ago
  > Using Bootstrap isn't going to make your site less accessible or less secure. the same could be said for jQuery, still less and less people are using it
  - rchaud 7y ago
    Using vanilla JS instead of jQuery doesn't require refactoring the site's layout and changing every page template. And even then, a decision like that wouldn't be made unless there were significant QoL improvements in terms of site speed or maintainability. That is why BS5 can afford to drop jQuery as a dependency. Developers working on highly performant apps where ops/second matters would already be using vanilla JS, and that's what BS5 is trying to support with this; jQuery doesn't play well with React/Vue after all. But devs that are working on CMS-style websites, which make up the majority of actual websites on the internet, can continue to use jQuery if they want to.

drinchev 7y ago

I'm even not sure what an average experience on IE11 would be for any users. I push as much as I can to POs / stakeholders to just disable non-critical features on IE11 and just leave the basic functionality. I doubt anyone using IE11 likes that fact, so sounds good to give them just another reason to complain about their experience to their superiors. I will definitely never see "The product that just works on IE11" as a slogan, so being competitive in this won't be reasonable argument.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Ha, my office's intranet is MS SharePoint, the menu is broken in Chrome. I sent them the CSS to fix it (unnecessary divs are added, you just need the right selector and you can display:none them all) ... worked fine in IE11, apparently that's justification for a WONTFIX (fixed it for myself with uBlock). Lots of emails come around saying use/don't use IE11 for this operation because half the time it doesn't work, and half the time the sites being linked aren't standards compliant. As an ex webdev it's hard not to be annoyed.

baccredited 7y ago

I have access to analytics for a big government site. 11% of all traffic in March 2020 was IE11.

tzs 7y ago
I have access to order processing logs from a small site whose customers use Windows and who are generally not very technical. Of people who actually order: 36% Chrome 26% Edge 19% Firefox 19% IE11
- e12e 7y ago
  No problem. If you drop support for ie11, those stats become: Of people who actually order: 44% Chrome 32% Edge 23% Firefox Unfortunately total orders will drop...

Raed667 7y ago

The only reason we still "support" IE11 in my company is that a "significant" number of our users visit us in their working-hours from IE11. During the weekend this kind of traffic drops significantly, which means to me that people using IE have to, and not choose to.

maelito 7y ago

Don't forget the fact that some (how much ?) users visit websites with IE because it's the default browser on their entreprise setup, but admins have installed Firefox alongside for compatibility with modern websites. So dropping IE is almost a service for them. Source : french administration with thousands of employees.

lazyjones 7y ago

What are some good alternatives for developers who don't want to lose 2,39% (or whatever the current MSIE11 market share is) of their visitors/revenue? Bulma claims 90% compatibility with IE11 at least. Foundation 6 seems to support IE9+.

StreamBright 7y ago
Market share != revenue share.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
  Exactly. In fact, for some domains, supporting IE11 can mean losing money. There is the technical cost, but also the support cost which tends to be higher.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Market share != revenue share. This can certainly be true. The amount of revenue my company generates from IE11 users is at least an order of magnitude more than its Chrome, Firefox, and Safari users combined.
purerandomness 7y ago
Just continue using the 4.x branch, it's perfectly fine and I think it's still going to receive maintenance for some time.
tln 7y ago
Those ie11 users may be able to just fire up chrome etc when they need to. That is my recent experience at least We build an IE compatible marketing and sign up flow, so I may only be seeing the motivated users' behavior
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > Those ie11 users may be able to just fire up chrome etc when they need to. They may. They may also just hit the back button. One of those actions requires much less inertia than the other.

darekkay 7y ago

Even StackOverflow dropped IE11 support recently [1], mainly to be able to use CSS custom properties in their Dark Theme implementation. [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/31/building-dark-mode-on-stack-overflow/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/31/building-dark-mode-on-...

aesyondu 7y ago
It makes sense when we assume that StackOverflow's audience are those who know enough not to use IE11.

websitescenes 7y ago

Good lord, looks like I’ll have to wait a few years to use this update then. We have a decent amount of legacy browser users that need support. Wish that Bootstrap supported these still widely used browsers. Had the same problem with v4.

dangus 7y ago
“Need” support, until you just force them to not need it. Like how YouTube basically killed off IE6: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-internet-explorer-6-kill-plot-engineer https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in... As long as people don’t have a reason to change, they won’t. I say you drop support now and consider yourselves lucky that you can ditch your more difficult and problematic customers. I mean, of course, I know this isn’t a realistic course of action for everyone. But I wish it was.
- joshuaissac 7y ago
  It is usually the difficult and problematic enterprise customers using IE11 that also pay the most money. The choice between ditching customers and ditching a framework is not usually difficult.
  - websitescenes 7y ago
    Agreed, keeping your customers supported is #1 priority. This is a super hard lesson for many new engineers as they always want to use the latest and greatest bleeding edge tech. Unfortunately that want rarely aligns with the businesses needs.

strenholme 7y ago

I make sure my website is still 100% functional in IE11: Using only .jpg and .png (I don’t use .gif on my website) for images; not using too much Javascript; using .woff instead of .woff2 webfonts; text-shadow instead of text-stroke to give one font an outline look; etc. If I was building a node website which depended on a bunch of packages from developers who may or may not care about IE11, this would not be possible. But since I’ve done the entire design by hand with HTML and CSS for over a decade, I can keep it IE11 compatible without issue. Also, everything works if Javascript is turned off, and there are reasonable (if not great) fallback fonts for users who disable webfonts.

untog 7y ago
The second half of what you're saying is just standard web development practise. And as for the rest... everyone has to make a judgement call. Do you still support IE8? Presumably not. As the percentage of users with a browser drops the amount of development work required to support it means you drop it. For a lot of us the number of IE11 users (< 1%) means it simply isn't worth the time. (also, please let's cut it out with the "young developers" stuff. I've been around long enough to see lazy developers both young and old.)
- strenholme 7y ago
  To answer your question: My site still works in IE8, but with minimal CSS. It works in IE7 and IE6 with, albeit without CSS (except for my online resume), so it gracefully degrades. I have been phasing out IE8 support through the 2010s; in 2012 I went to a lot of effort to make everything look nice in IE8 but phased out that work as I updated the site. It’s also perfectly readable in browsers without CSS and Javascript, including Lynx. Dillo and Netsurf both have CSS implementations so broken, some versions of those browsers have rendering issues unless they disable CSS. It is possible to make a website which renders in Lynx, which is perfectly readable in IE6, which can be read in a browser without CSS or Javascript.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

jmull 7y ago

Well, this is a mistake. Nobody likes to support IE11 but dropping support moves Bootstrap 5 from "just use Bootstrap" to "Bootstrap has tricky pitfalls". Before someone can use Bootstrap 5 they need to be sure and confident that they don't need IE11 and never will.

_bxg1 7y ago
IE11 was supplanted by Edge years ago. Windows 10 ships with Edge preinstalled (it comes with both, but you're not stuck with IE). Windows 7 and older are no longer supported by MS. The only in-between is Windows 8 which everyone hated so I doubt it has a huge market share, especially in enterprises which are the only ones who might be "stuck" with the browsers that come preinstalled on the OS.
- x3haloed 7y ago
  Unfortunately, the enterprise world is still making extensive use of IE11. Here is the browser breakdown on an enterprise application I work on: https://i.postimg.cc/cCbk34SR/Screenshot-20200407-083321.png https://i.postimg.cc/cCbk34SR/Screenshot-20200407-083321.png As of now, Bootstrap 5 cannot be considered for use in any website with heavy use from enterprise users. Edit: though it is nice to see that Chromium Edge is already catching up to Spartan Edge!
  - speedgoose 7y ago
    It depends. At work we decided to not support IE11 for a product and all the users understand that they need to use something else than IE. So the breakdown is pretty much 0% for IE. It's another story if you are selling, but if the users must use your application, they will click on the other blue e icon.
    - x3haloed 7y ago
      Unless of course the "other" blue E icon is unavailable because they are on Windows 7 without administrative rights to install Chromium Edge, or Edge has been flat out disabled through group policy. https://i.postimg.cc/FzBj9Ttp/Screenshot-20200407-084447.png https://i.postimg.cc/FzBj9Ttp/Screenshot-20200407-084447.png

soperj 7y ago

FINALLY!

leejoramo 7y ago

What is the the expected release date for Bootstrap 5. Being that it is still an early Alpha, this change may not have a significant impact for a while.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago

Microsoft (or a third party) needs to do this: I. Rename IE11 something like "MS ActiveX Runtime For LOB Network Apps" (AXR for short) or something like "MS ActiveX Player". II. Create an MMC console entitled "AXR Domain Manager" that identifies a list of domains that open in AXR instead of the default browser. This list is controllable via group policy and other MS management tools. III. Modify IE where if a website not in the aforementioned list is accessed, a popup saying "This site will be opened in your default browser" appears and the link opens up in the default browser. It would make it so much easier to explain to non-technical people that IE11 is really a legacy app engine at this point and shouldn't be used for modern website usage.

acdha 7y ago
Isn't that basically what Enterprise Mode does? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-to-improve-compatibility https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-... > If you have specific websites and apps that have compatibility problems with Microsoft Edge, you can use the Enterprise Mode site list so that the websites open in Internet Explorer 11 automatically. Additionally, if you know that your intranet sites aren't going to work correctly with Microsoft Edge, you can set all intranet sites to automatically open using IE11 with the Send all intranet sites to IE group policy.
- amanzi 7y ago
  Yes - that's exactly what it does!
- int_19h 7y ago
  I think the point is to do the reverse - if somebody does run IE11 directly (rather than Edge), and tries to open a website that is not in the system-wide whitelist, it forces them to use Edge.

cfv 7y ago

As a provider, supporting old tech stacks sucks. They're clunky, have all kinds of warts and annoying workarounds for stuff that got improved in future versions. As a consumer, being told my light bulbs won't work with the new fixture is a great reason to no longer work with that provider. As a provider that knows this, I'd rather support the old tech stack right up to the point my ability to keep the lights on isn't at risk.

zimmund 7y ago
At this point supporting IE is like making light fixtures that support candles as well.

tcd 7y ago

It seems IE11 has become the new Python 2.7. I can only hope one day MS decides to pull the plug entirely, it can't run any new JS features and is clinging onto life. Eventually, the web will just break (for example, http/3), and IE will be forced to retire. We just need the "right" pieces to break before it can retire in peace.

vinniejames 7y ago

This sounds like a terrible idea. Most of the reason to use a framework like Bootstrap is to avoid dealing with cross browser issues, looking at you IE

wnevets 7y ago

I would love to drop IE11 support but its still generates way too much revenue. V5 won't be an option until that changes.

0xff00ffee 7y ago

There are still companies in Europe I work with that use IE11. Since we switched from jQuery to Vue last year, we put a friendly reminder on each page saying IE11 is not supported (since its ES6 support sucks), but the tickets still came in. Finally we installed a header on all B2B sites that pops a modal error saying please don't use IE11. The tickets stopped abruptly. I was expecting complaints, but the majority of them already have alt browsers installed, so instead of asking, in this case forcing them to use a different browser worked much better.

e12e 7y ago
Won't this be great when Google and everyone else kills off the user agent header? 5 years from now, there'll be no forcing/detecting users with old ipads, chromebooks or phones.
- bepvte 7y ago
  You should reread that article
  - e12e 7y ago
    Hmm, valid point. https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-hints/ https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-hints/
- jannes 7y ago
  Does it matter that newer browser versions are freezing the user agent? Microsoft will never remove it from IE11, so you can always detect IE to show a modal popup.

jakearmitage 7y ago

Are there any frameworks like this that support IE10 or IE11?

lanius 7y ago

Small world, the committer is one of the main contributors to MPC-HC (RIP)

k__ 7y ago

Somehow Bootstrap became the jQuery of CSS for me. I used it excessively 6 years ago. Then the v4 took an eternity to release and I already switched to different solutions. I would have thought that people that are still using it are doing so because of legacy support.

jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
Which solutions?

ativzzz 7y ago

Why aren't IE users considered more when thinking about accessibility? The best practice is to incorporate a11y accessibility standards to accommodate the small percentage of users who use screen readers and/or have color blindness/other disabilities. Why are we so quick to drop IE11 support when supporting users with disabilities is just as much work if not more? And possibly are a smaller percentage of users than IE users? You'll never read "Bootstrap stops supporting screen readers and removes aria tags in v6". By extension, can we classify IE usage as a disability? Only half joking: I imagine a lot of current IE users are either doing it because of work or because they are technologically illiterate.

bfred_it 7y ago
Disability isn’t a choice