5 ms·

"Incompatibility with IE11, so you can tell the man upstairs 'sorry boss it's out of my hands, blame Tailwind'..." I know it's said tongue-in-cheek, but popula

"Incompatibility with IE11, so you can tell the man upstairs 'sorry boss it's out of my hands, blame Tailwind'..." I know it's said tongue-in-cheek, but popular frameworks taking this stance is valuable when convincing clients, leaders, authority, etc. to not require IE support. I've consulted on dozens of front-end projects, and showing the stance of "industry leaders" is the most convincing argument.

youngtaff 6y ago
That's the tail wagging the dog though… I've got clients whose customers using IE11 represent 1-2% of revenue i.e. $1M+ / year
- swyx 6y ago
  yes but one of my central arguments [1] is that it is time to explicitly charge customers for IE11 support rather than implicitly have your 99% of customers subsidise support for the 1% 1: https://www.swyx.io/ie11-eol/ https://www.swyx.io/ie11-eol/
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    these customers are obviously the poorest percentile
  - youngtaff 6y ago
    Yes, but you're using that argument in the context of a software business rather than a consumer facing retail business
- onion2k 6y ago
  How much could they increase the revenue from the 98-99% by if they dropped IE11 and moved faster, spent less time on supporting old browsers, or embraced new features? It's possible (even likely) that simplifying the code by supporting fewer targets that need additional work would increase the overall profit.
  - youngtaff 6y ago
    Most likely zero They're an online retailer and those customers would just go to someone else who's site would work in IE11 People aren't stuck on IE11 out of choice, it's corporate policies and other factors at play
- blackoil 6y ago
  How many of them are unable to use a new browser? Long back our enterprise app didn't work on IE6, our stance was, "yeah it does not, install Chrome". I don't think we ever lost a deal because of it.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  > Internet Explorer represents less than 1% of my work traffic according to Google Analytics. People will sometime spin this away by arguing that 1% of a large number is also a large number. If you have 100 million hits, 1% is 1 million hits! But the flipside is that 99 million hits are not Internet Explorer and are not helped by optimizations aimed at Internet Explorer. https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2020/time-to-kill-ie11/ https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2020/time-to-kill-ie11/ 1% is 1%. If you can’t find a better way to improve revenue by 1%, you’re in too narrow of a market fit.
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lhnz 6y ago
At this point even JIRA and Microsoft 365 have dropped support for IE11. The majority of big corporates have either moved to Chrome or are hurriedly doing so. However, there are presumably old computers in far-off corners of the world that still use IE11. I wonder what will happen there...
- moron4hire 6y ago
  They can continue to use IE11 for that one, weird corporate intranet app that nobody likes using anyway, and they can also load a modern browser for everything else the user has to do. Browsers don't exclude each other.
- Rapzid 6y ago
  Microsoft, in general, doesn't even really "support" IE as a general purpose browser. They view it as a compatibility platform for old IE-only apps. Edge is Microsoft's only general purpose browser ATM.
- swyx 6y ago
  as well as linkedin, skillshare, dailymotion, etc. i keep a running thread of major IE11 drops here https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1260627626739130369?s=20 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1260627626739130369?s=20
_jjkk 6y ago
This depends completely on the industry. Maybe a dev tools startup etc. would accept the Industry Leader argument, but Retail for example would never pass up the revenue opportunity by dropping IE11 support. I've always appreciated when libraries who drop IE11 support provide polyfills etc., or at least some notes on it, since the library author knows better than anyone which corners are not IE11 compatible. This eases adoption in these other industries, instead of taking this hard stance which may sound good, but ends up limiting the # of devs who can use the library.
- sevencolors 6y ago
  Good news is v1.9 supports IE11 and is pretty damn good already. A lot of the updates here are just default config options for tailwind, that you can add yourself to mimic 2.0
dylan604 6y ago
I would have thought that the most convincing argument would be that the company that made the software has deprecated the software and no longer supports it. However, it's not always the user's decision, and they are forced to use IE due to a corporate IT decision to lock down the users from allowing software installs (understandably). I've used a product for doing webcasts that 90% of the users were on IE11. The training was for nurses using hospital provided computers that are locked down by their IT staff (for good reasons). These poor users are forced to use the default browser that came with the OS. Every single issue that the users had was from someone using IE. Some hospitals finally relented and deployed Chrome for the users doing the webcast.

youngtaff 6y ago

That's the tail wagging the dog though… I've got clients whose customers using IE11 represent 1-2% of revenue i.e. $1M+ / year

swyx 6y ago
yes but one of my central arguments [1] is that it is time to explicitly charge customers for IE11 support rather than implicitly have your 99% of customers subsidise support for the 1% 1: https://www.swyx.io/ie11-eol/ https://www.swyx.io/ie11-eol/
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  these customers are obviously the poorest percentile
- youngtaff 6y ago
  Yes, but you're using that argument in the context of a software business rather than a consumer facing retail business
onion2k 6y ago
How much could they increase the revenue from the 98-99% by if they dropped IE11 and moved faster, spent less time on supporting old browsers, or embraced new features? It's possible (even likely) that simplifying the code by supporting fewer targets that need additional work would increase the overall profit.
- youngtaff 6y ago
  Most likely zero They're an online retailer and those customers would just go to someone else who's site would work in IE11 People aren't stuck on IE11 out of choice, it's corporate policies and other factors at play
blackoil 6y ago
How many of them are unable to use a new browser? Long back our enterprise app didn't work on IE6, our stance was, "yeah it does not, install Chrome". I don't think we ever lost a deal because of it.
earthboundkid 6y ago
> Internet Explorer represents less than 1% of my work traffic according to Google Analytics. People will sometime spin this away by arguing that 1% of a large number is also a large number. If you have 100 million hits, 1% is 1 million hits! But the flipside is that 99 million hits are not Internet Explorer and are not helped by optimizations aimed at Internet Explorer. https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2020/time-to-kill-ie11/ https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2020/time-to-kill-ie11/ 1% is 1%. If you can’t find a better way to improve revenue by 1%, you’re in too narrow of a market fit.
- deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago

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lhnz 6y ago

At this point even JIRA and Microsoft 365 have dropped support for IE11. The majority of big corporates have either moved to Chrome or are hurriedly doing so. However, there are presumably old computers in far-off corners of the world that still use IE11. I wonder what will happen there...

moron4hire 6y ago
They can continue to use IE11 for that one, weird corporate intranet app that nobody likes using anyway, and they can also load a modern browser for everything else the user has to do. Browsers don't exclude each other.
Rapzid 6y ago
Microsoft, in general, doesn't even really "support" IE as a general purpose browser. They view it as a compatibility platform for old IE-only apps. Edge is Microsoft's only general purpose browser ATM.
swyx 6y ago
as well as linkedin, skillshare, dailymotion, etc. i keep a running thread of major IE11 drops here https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1260627626739130369?s=20 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1260627626739130369?s=20

_jjkk 6y ago

This depends completely on the industry. Maybe a dev tools startup etc. would accept the Industry Leader argument, but Retail for example would never pass up the revenue opportunity by dropping IE11 support. I've always appreciated when libraries who drop IE11 support provide polyfills etc., or at least some notes on it, since the library author knows better than anyone which corners are not IE11 compatible. This eases adoption in these other industries, instead of taking this hard stance which may sound good, but ends up limiting the # of devs who can use the library.

sevencolors 6y ago
Good news is v1.9 supports IE11 and is pretty damn good already. A lot of the updates here are just default config options for tailwind, that you can add yourself to mimic 2.0

dylan604 6y ago

I would have thought that the most convincing argument would be that the company that made the software has deprecated the software and no longer supports it. However, it's not always the user's decision, and they are forced to use IE due to a corporate IT decision to lock down the users from allowing software installs (understandably). I've used a product for doing webcasts that 90% of the users were on IE11. The training was for nurses using hospital provided computers that are locked down by their IT staff (for good reasons). These poor users are forced to use the default browser that came with the OS. Every single issue that the users had was from someone using IE. Some hospitals finally relented and deployed Chrome for the users doing the webcast.