8 ms·

Bootstrap no longer depends on jQuery and we’ve dropped support for Internet Explorer.

vagab0nd 6y ago
I just recently picked up front end dev and I'm curious how professional teams handle IE these days. Is it completely ignored? Or do sites still try to support it?
- Domenic_S 6y ago
  Mostly ignored now. Reddit's broken in IE11 (at least the simulated IE11)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- antris 6y ago
  It is very rare to have to support Internet Explorer anymore for new applications. Most software that requires IE support is legacy enterprise stuff. Microsoft has been promoting Edge for 5 years already over IE.
- LocalPCGuy 6y ago
  Depends on your customers. Can't just look at the stat counter usage sites and determine based on that. You have to look at who uses your site, and then decide what the financial impact of not supporting IE is going to be. Where I work, we sell into large companies, where IE may be a default browser without the ability to install an alternative. Therefore, we support IE11 (only version of IE still officially supported). Financially, it would be irresponsible not to, as it could kill 6 or 7 figure contracts if the CEO tries to use our software and it doesn't load or just shows them a "upgrade your browser" page. But even then, we do make allowances for IE. It is slower. In fact, some of the speed issues come from adding polyfills for things we deemed necessary for efficient development. It may not have exactly the same layout (for instance, we use an accordion to reduce the number of elements on a screen for IE on one page, but a list of carousels in browsers that are capable of handling the extra complexity). We actually attempted to use CSS Grid, and it mostly worked. We've since stripped most of that out except some of the base page structures - just too many edge cases. And flex actually works fairly well as long as you stay away from some of the well-defined known issues. Anyways, to the main point - has to be a site by site decision based on your site's visitor base, their browsers, and whether it makes the financial sense to spend the time supporting IE compared to the return you may get.
  - democracy 6y ago
    Yeah, same, also you don't wanna be on a demo with the sales, GMs and VPs of all sorts and all of a sudden find yourself in the position to explain the 'cross-platform' problems they are having on their devices - seen that, it's ugly, thus you go with the LCD - thanks to jquery!
  - collinmanderson 6y ago
    Yeah, I do business-to-business ecommerce and our yearly revenue coming from Internet Explorer is _more_ than _mobile_ (excluding tablet). So, yes similar story. IE11 needs to _work_, though maybe not as well. Though, I generally avoid polyfills (even jQuery) and try to just write code works natively in IE11. I have a feeling IE11 will be around a while.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  IE11 support is still common. Almost nobody is supporting anything lower than that. I expect that will be gone in a couple of years.
- XCSme 6y ago
  We should all not care about IE anymore. Devs supporting it is the reason for people using it. If all the sites would be broken IE, users would be forced to upgrade.
- perardi 6y ago
  It’s very much a matter of “what is your audience.” My current employer has dropped IE11 for new projects, but we keep it around for already extant products and pages, unless we do a full redesign and rethink. IE11 is such a small percentage these days that the cost/benefit ratio isn’t good. (I only prototype stuff as a designer, so I am just throwing caution to the wind and doing whatever the Big 3 rendering engines support, because the idea of giving up grid makes me sad, now that I understand how it works. [sort of understand how it works])
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  In enterprise IT, I'm seeing more and more shops that refuse to give us support unless we switch from Firefox to Chrome, because that's "all they know works". Which is to say, a lot of your potential customers already probably have a dozen tools they depend on that don't work in IE already anyways.
SkyBelow 6y ago
I wonder if I can get more web developers where I work back in the bootstrap camp now. Use of jQuery was their main complaint and reason for abandoning. On a related note, I feel like I'm officially becoming an old fogy because I learned web development with jQuery but never did enough to experience the pains it brings that newer frameworks do away with, and as such I still feel drawn to using jQuery, especially when I want to throw together a smaller websites.
- jasonhansel 6y ago
  jQuery does still have a place for smaller websites IMHO. I really wish Intercooler (http://intercoolerjs.org/ http://intercoolerjs.org/) had caught on more for such uses.
  - xellisx 6y ago
    There is also Cash JS.
  - pcardoso 6y ago
    The author of Intercooler has a new project https://htmx.org https://htmx.org
    - brylie 6y ago
      Dang. The documentation links don't seem to work on Firefox Mobile.
      - DangitBobby 6y ago
        That's strange. They work for me on Firefox Preview
    - tapvt 6y ago
      I’m very excited to find this. I have a handful of projects in my pipeline that require “just enough” of the dynamic sugar that this could potentially provide for little investment of time.
ErikAugust 6y ago
The thing is, you never really needed jQuery. You could always add whatever JS-powered stuff you needed back in with vanilla.
- Anon4Now 6y ago
  They didn't _need_ it, but I think people gloss over how much easier jQuery made things back in the Bootstrap 1 era. In essence, Bootstrap used jQuery to bootstrap Bootstrap.
nogabebop23 6y ago
>> we’ve dropped support for Internet Explorer. IE is still a thing in the enterprise and a lot of enterprise web apps are built on bootstrap. I totally understand their motivations but until IE is dead I wish they'd kept support. Based on the planned EOL this leads me to believe that they don't expect BS 5 to pick up steam in corporate environments until later next year.
- julianlam 6y ago
  BS4 being in maintenance doesn't mean it will cease to work. I imagine they'll just continue to use BS4 (or 3, or 2, even...)

I just recently picked up front end dev and I'm curious how professional teams handle IE these days. Is it completely ignored? Or do sites still try to support it?

Domenic_S 6y ago
Mostly ignored now. Reddit's broken in IE11 (at least the simulated IE11)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
antris 6y ago
It is very rare to have to support Internet Explorer anymore for new applications. Most software that requires IE support is legacy enterprise stuff. Microsoft has been promoting Edge for 5 years already over IE.
LocalPCGuy 6y ago
Depends on your customers. Can't just look at the stat counter usage sites and determine based on that. You have to look at who uses your site, and then decide what the financial impact of not supporting IE is going to be. Where I work, we sell into large companies, where IE may be a default browser without the ability to install an alternative. Therefore, we support IE11 (only version of IE still officially supported). Financially, it would be irresponsible not to, as it could kill 6 or 7 figure contracts if the CEO tries to use our software and it doesn't load or just shows them a "upgrade your browser" page. But even then, we do make allowances for IE. It is slower. In fact, some of the speed issues come from adding polyfills for things we deemed necessary for efficient development. It may not have exactly the same layout (for instance, we use an accordion to reduce the number of elements on a screen for IE on one page, but a list of carousels in browsers that are capable of handling the extra complexity). We actually attempted to use CSS Grid, and it mostly worked. We've since stripped most of that out except some of the base page structures - just too many edge cases. And flex actually works fairly well as long as you stay away from some of the well-defined known issues. Anyways, to the main point - has to be a site by site decision based on your site's visitor base, their browsers, and whether it makes the financial sense to spend the time supporting IE compared to the return you may get.
- democracy 6y ago
  Yeah, same, also you don't wanna be on a demo with the sales, GMs and VPs of all sorts and all of a sudden find yourself in the position to explain the 'cross-platform' problems they are having on their devices - seen that, it's ugly, thus you go with the LCD - thanks to jquery!
- collinmanderson 6y ago
  Yeah, I do business-to-business ecommerce and our yearly revenue coming from Internet Explorer is _more_ than _mobile_ (excluding tablet). So, yes similar story. IE11 needs to _work_, though maybe not as well. Though, I generally avoid polyfills (even jQuery) and try to just write code works natively in IE11. I have a feeling IE11 will be around a while.
nicoburns 6y ago
IE11 support is still common. Almost nobody is supporting anything lower than that. I expect that will be gone in a couple of years.
XCSme 6y ago
We should all not care about IE anymore. Devs supporting it is the reason for people using it. If all the sites would be broken IE, users would be forced to upgrade.
perardi 6y ago
It’s very much a matter of “what is your audience.” My current employer has dropped IE11 for new projects, but we keep it around for already extant products and pages, unless we do a full redesign and rethink. IE11 is such a small percentage these days that the cost/benefit ratio isn’t good. (I only prototype stuff as a designer, so I am just throwing caution to the wind and doing whatever the Big 3 rendering engines support, because the idea of giving up grid makes me sad, now that I understand how it works. [sort of understand how it works])
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
In enterprise IT, I'm seeing more and more shops that refuse to give us support unless we switch from Firefox to Chrome, because that's "all they know works". Which is to say, a lot of your potential customers already probably have a dozen tools they depend on that don't work in IE already anyways.

SkyBelow 6y ago

I wonder if I can get more web developers where I work back in the bootstrap camp now. Use of jQuery was their main complaint and reason for abandoning. On a related note, I feel like I'm officially becoming an old fogy because I learned web development with jQuery but never did enough to experience the pains it brings that newer frameworks do away with, and as such I still feel drawn to using jQuery, especially when I want to throw together a smaller websites.

jasonhansel 6y ago
jQuery does still have a place for smaller websites IMHO. I really wish Intercooler (http://intercoolerjs.org/ http://intercoolerjs.org/) had caught on more for such uses.
- xellisx 6y ago
  There is also Cash JS.
- pcardoso 6y ago
  The author of Intercooler has a new project https://htmx.org https://htmx.org
  - brylie 6y ago
    Dang. The documentation links don't seem to work on Firefox Mobile.
    - DangitBobby 6y ago
      That's strange. They work for me on Firefox Preview
  - tapvt 6y ago
    I’m very excited to find this. I have a handful of projects in my pipeline that require “just enough” of the dynamic sugar that this could potentially provide for little investment of time.

ErikAugust 6y ago

The thing is, you never really needed jQuery. You could always add whatever JS-powered stuff you needed back in with vanilla.

Anon4Now 6y ago
They didn't _need_ it, but I think people gloss over how much easier jQuery made things back in the Bootstrap 1 era. In essence, Bootstrap used jQuery to bootstrap Bootstrap.

nogabebop23 6y ago

>> we’ve dropped support for Internet Explorer. IE is still a thing in the enterprise and a lot of enterprise web apps are built on bootstrap. I totally understand their motivations but until IE is dead I wish they'd kept support. Based on the planned EOL this leads me to believe that they don't expect BS 5 to pick up steam in corporate environments until later next year.

julianlam 6y ago
BS4 being in maintenance doesn't mean it will cease to work. I imagine they'll just continue to use BS4 (or 3, or 2, even...)