17 ms·

Vue 3 drops IE11 support plan

385 points by simon04 5y ago

toddmorey 5y ago
I definitely think they made the right call here. Even Microsoft is dropping support in Office 365. Commendable, too, that they are working to backport some v3 features to the v2 codebase.
warpech 5y ago
You can't have evolution without dropping ties to the past from time to time. That's about time to drop IE11 to take full advantage of modern Web features.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  How much more does the web really need to evolve though? Maybe IE 11 already had all the features that the web platform really needs, and the upgrade treadmill is now being driven by nothing more than our insatiable demand for convenience as spoiled developers. Pity the users who can't keep up with the treadmill.
  - rk06 5y ago
    Web needs a lot. Web standards i.e. html,css and js are always evolving and web needs to evolve with it. IE11 is frozen in time. and won't support any newer tech, think about web components, HTTP 3 etc.
  - warpech 5y ago
    I agree that for many use cases, IE11 featureset is fine. We jump on the SPA ship too often. I think that static content and server-side rendered apps are often the best option that is for some reason considered out-of-fashion. However, for those who see a Web browser as an application runtime, IE11 should be out of question. Vue is an application framework, and as such, it should benefit from all the improvements in the Web platform implemented in the modern Web browsers.
bearjaws 5y ago
I am counting down the days until our customers stop using IE11, most of them offer the option of IE11 or Edge. We have so little traffic from it now, and the browser renders far slower than Edge / Chrome. Habits are hard to kick in enterprise.
- dr-detroit 5y ago
  These cats make a 5% raise every year I don't think scumbag IT decision makers will ever die they will soon be able to afford advanced AI constructs to house their consciousness. IE11 will never die screenshot this post its only 2021 right now.
yannoninator 5y ago
Who still uses IE11 anyway?
- bovermyer 5y ago
  Not sure. Globally, IE has 0.71% browser market share. SOMEONE is using it.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Some legacy Windows software are stuck with IE 11 for their webviews.
- nextweek2 5y ago
  This is an old joke: Those downloading Chrome.
- ta988 5y ago
  Some lab equipment with internal HTTP servers require IE6 to be configured . And they are still sold... It is almost usable in IE11 but you have to disable tons of safeties.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jackdh 5y ago
  Speaking from previous experience it's likely legacy systems built for even older IE's (8,9,10) were patched to IE11 but not any further due to time (money) involved.
- goda90 5y ago
  I work writing enterprise software. IE is integrated into our legacy desktop client so we can render new web pieces until everything is updated to be web, then we'll switch to Electron for the client. It's a huge pain to get things like CSS to work right, and the dev tools are super buggy.
- omh 5y ago
  This week I've been dealing with an IE11 related problem from a C# app. The C# app is built using WebBrowser Control[1] which is tightly integrated with the app itself. WebBrowser only supports IE11 but the webapps that it connects to are increasingly dropping support. The vendor is reluctant to upgrade their app because the replacement options apparently (?) require extensive refactoring to get the same integration. IE11 seems to be in a weird limbo. But the fact that it's still technically supported by Microsoft means that conservative software vendors aren't forced to migrate. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/controls/webbrowser-control-windows-forms https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/con...
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
- Not even supported by Microsoft apps like Teams - Easily less than 1% market share - IE11 is side by side packaged with some version of Edge in almost every case This seems reasonable.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  Plus they're backporting features to v2 and making it the new lts
egonschiele 5y ago
I've heard that the people who use IE11 are the ones who don't have a choice, because maybe they are using a computer at a library, or some kind of accessibility-related device. Does anyone on HN know of solid data to back this claim? This screenreader[1] survey for example says 11% of their users use IE11, though that is from 2019. [1] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#browsers https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#browsers
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  All Windows screen readers with any significant user base have supported Chromium and Firefox for a while now. The old EdgeHTML engine didn't work so well with third-party Windows screen readers, so some blind users may have held onto IE 11 because of that. But any Windows screen reader that works with Chrome also works with the Chromium-based Edge. And note that the WebAIM survey you released was from before the Chromium-based Edge started being pushed to the broader Windows user base. Bottom line: Web developers should not feel obligated to keep supporting IE 11 for the sake of screen reader users.
- jayflux 5y ago
  People using IE 11 “because they have to” is a hard thing to quantify without some sort of survey. I say this because even though your anecdote rings true, I’ve seen many people in offices use IE 11 purely out of ignorance and comfort reasons rather than because they were forced. They had Edge, Firefox installed but stuck with IE because no one told them to stop using it. We may be underestimating the portion of “if it ain’t broke why fix it” crowd are using IE 11 but it’s hard to say with statistical data alone. Anyway, regardless of how it’s sliced, it’s low enough now for libraries to start dropping.
- frereubu 5y ago
  We build websites for organisations in the UK who do a lot of work with the NHS, and we regularly still see ~10% visits from IE11 in Google Analytics. Organisations that don’t work with the NHS consistently show < 2%, so although I don’t have conclusive proof I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on for us.
ta988 5y ago
Talking about vue, I'm really waiting for Vuetify to support Vue3. Especially with typescript I feel like the current ways to describe fragments are a bit half-assed.
cuddlecake 5y ago
Coincidentally, Angular is going to deprecate IE11 support with Angular 12, and remove it with Angular 13 https://blog.angular.io/angular-v12-is-now-available-32ed51fbfd49 https://blog.angular.io/angular-v12-is-now-available-32ed51f...
- notjustanymike 5y ago
  Must be something in the water today. Although I quite like a coordinated attack on my most hated browser, so I'm not complaining.
  - TheRealPomax 5y ago
    I don't recall anyone talking about removing support for Safari though.
    - cuddlecake 5y ago
      I'm working with Angular on my dayjob, I wish they'd just deprecate the entire framework
      - cout 5y ago
        Angularjs (aka Angular 1.x) is supposedly being deprecated. There are enough sites out there still using it in production that I'll be surprised if nobody steps in to pick up development.
    - notjustanymike 5y ago
      That, and WKWebView with it's pesky 1GB memory limitation.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I find it amusing that people complain about React not being stable enough, and yet it still supports IE9 as Angular and Vue both look to remove IE11 support.
al2o3cr 5y ago
TBH the only reason some clients are all the way on IE11 is because IE10 doesn't support TLS1.2, so they HAD to move to pass a security audit.
- dspillett 5y ago
  Yep. And "some clients" includes "large companies in the UK's banking industry".
darkhorse13 5y ago
This is obviously great overall, developing for IE is a pain. One weird anecdote though, I have an old laptop that has very little memory, running Windows 10. And I swear, IE11 works better than Chrome and Edge for websites that support it. Chromium seriously seems to crash my computer because of some memory issue. Any idea why this happens (regarding IE performing better)? I only know this because I maintain a CSS framework that supports IE11, so I have to use IE quite a bit.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  I used to have a similar issue on my laptop. IE was the only browser capable of viewing YouTube videos at 1080p without stutter. Firefox would stutter, as would Chrome and Chromium Edge. I've since given the laptop a clear out, reinstalling Windows 10 and installing Kubuntu as well. The issue has now gone away. Firefox now copes fine from either OS.
jug 5y ago
Heh, so we really ought to move from MSHTML... We're embedding a web browser control in our app for flexibility in adapting the GIS documentation system to varying needs depending on customer. Some customers document more details on electricity meters than others, some tie them to other billing systems on the backend than others. Etc... But it's actually working out great and we can as a bonus update these parts of the desktop app without even shutting it down. Our app has a web API that the scripts interact with. The obvious downside is that it's using IE 11. WebView2 exists though which uses Microsoft's Chromium fork, but the control is only now reaching production quality. Like mere months ago. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ But it'll probably be what we eventually do especially as it supports Windows 7 which is quite something for emerging technology from Microsoft. We need this because surprisingly many customers still have Windows Server 2012 installs here and there. Sounds insane to run 10 year old servers for security reasons but the amazing thing is that Microsoft will support these to late 2023. For now we're in our most advanced scripts using Bootstrap Vue + VueJS 2 + a few polyfills and it's amazed me how seamless it actually is in developing on Chromium 90 and everything just keeps working and looking almost identical on IE 11. Interaction, model bindings, templating, everything. I totally did NOT expect this. I expected... "Support". I mean... This is some achievement. There's been the occasional, minor stumbling block every three months or so but still...
- adzm 5y ago
  WebView2 is basically CEF for the most part though. I would love for Trident or EdgeHTML to be released as open source honestly. I'm sure there are complicated licensing issues that would prevent this though. I built and helped maintain a relatively complicated application that interacts via the COM interfaces of MSHTML (and the crazy print template stuff) which basically has to be scrapped eventually.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
I have no love for IE, but does anyone remember when we designed web pages to work on any browser?
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  Yes. And it sucked. Lots of extra code and testing.
  - bnt 5y ago
    So what's the alternative? Code in Chrome and yolo?
    - greggturkington 5y ago
      The alternative is having a sane process for determining what browsers you support, an a rock-solid QA and release process.
    - Someone1234 5y ago
      They support Edge, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. That's 87.86% of what users are using (per Wikimedia's stats). To support the 1.76% of IE users, it will require a disproportionate amount of work that could negatively impact other development that benefits many more people. That's the reality: Development time is a zero-sum game. If you do this you aren't doing this other thing, and in this case we're talking about under 2% that likely should be discouraged from using it. PS - And this coming from someone whose uses are primarily on IE11 still (see my other post in the thread). Just because I personally benefit from IE11 staying around a few more years, doesn't mean the entire web should bend to that. IE11 must die, we just cannot turn on a needle, and when Edge dropped support for Java Applets/Flash it forced tons of organizations into IE11 for many more years than they would have wanted.
    - dspillett 5y ago
      Code to standards and expect the browsers to implement those standards reasonably. Avoid the bleeding edge to support those held back at LTS versions of common browsers, or if you use new tricks make sure they don't make things unusable on older-but-LTS browsers. Whether you consider IE11 an LTS browser or not is a matter for you to decide (yes, as it will be getting security updates for some time still, or no as it is seven years old, not getting any feature/support updates, and support for it is deprecated by even its own manufacture's apps). Support accessibility by not using fancy things for the sake of it, and if you do something fancy make at least a little effort to have things degrade gracefully for those with accessibility issues. A lot of sites/apps skip this step, but shouldn't.
______- 5y ago
I use IE6 as a sort of litmus test for websites. If a site works in IE6, it's more likely to work on every browser imaginable. Those people creating sites designed to work in the latest browser version only scare me to death.
- w-j-w 5y ago
  The landscape has changed. Most typical, everyday user have browsers that update themselves to the latest version. Supporting ancient technology (like IE6) doesn't provide a benefit that really justifies the enormous amount of work required. Just let the old browsers die already.
- labster 5y ago
  Flexbox and block-scoped variables aren’t really that scary. Honestly less scary than the alternatives, nested tables and global variables. Sometimes it’s okay to have nice things.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    ie6 doesn't even have inline-blocks. now that's scary
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  If you mean that IE6 represents some common set of baseline features that all other browsers will support this is absolutely 100% false. IE6 has tons of quirks and nonstandard features, and sites that are truly written specifically for IE6 and target its features (e.g. activex) and numerous css bugs will simply not work or display correctly in any other browsers at all. Newer versions of IE have to have two separate rendering modes. One of these, "quirks mode," is a non-standard mode that specifically emulates the broken IE6 functionality, because this is the only way to correctly display pages designed for IE6 in a modern browser. On the other hand, people writing new sites in 2021 that support IE are people who are very concerned with compatibility who are being very careful and using zillions of LOC of pollyfills to ensure the sites work in IE. The sites these people create will work in other browsers not because of any property of IE6, but because the people making them also put a lot of work into ensuring they are compatible with other browsers, and dropping support for IE would save a lot of work without reducing compatibility with other browsers.
rk06 5y ago
When looking at IE users, the percentage of users using only IE would be smaller. Especially, since microsoft is now supporting MS edge on windows 10. Moreover even if some old app is using vbscript or some arcane IE only stuff, then they are unlikely to modify the app,let alone adopt Vue.
rubyn00bie 5y ago
I'm not even joking when I say this, for some companies, it would literally be cheaper to buy your IE users a new computer. Obviously, for enterprise customers, who are likely to be the majority of IE 11 users, you can't necessarily do that (though think about if you can).
- ipaddr 5y ago
  It is not the computer that requires ie11 it awful software like remedy or legacy crystal reports or some professional healthcare vendor product.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    IE pre-Edge is best thought of as a built-in UI library that shipped with Windows, not a browser. When you add that + longevity in deeply integrated enterprise software, everything makes more sense.
    - 7952 5y ago
      You could have some kind of wrapper that installs legacy web sites as a separate app and starts a locked down embedded IE with a set of security policies.
      - woodrowbarlow 5y ago
        derelictron
      - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        That's effectively what the Edge team built for legacy IE app support.
  - thatsnotmepls 5y ago
    But if that is the case, why simply not install a separate browser along with IE11?
greggturkington 5y ago
Is anyone working on enterprise-level apps that see a significant number of conversions from IE11 right now? I'm surprised to learn a framework the size of Vue was still supporting it until now.
- wubin 5y ago
  SAP, one of the largest ERP vendors, is dropping IE support this year for most of their products including legacy ones.[0] And according to SAP, "91% of Forbes Global 2000" are SAP customers.[1] So we can expect enterprises moving to "modern browsers" this year if not done already. I do create B2B apps. Last time I had to support IE11 was 6 years ago. [0]: https://blogs.sap.com/2021/02/02/internet-explorer-11-will-no-longer-be-supported-by-various-sap-ui-technologies-in-newer-releases/ https://blogs.sap.com/2021/02/02/internet-explorer-11-will-n... [1]: https://www.sap.com/why-sap.html https://www.sap.com/why-sap.html
jjice 5y ago
Legitimate question: what companies (I'm assuming it's government) done have Chrome or Firefox installed? What is this IE compatibility caused by?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mkl95 5y ago
I hope this is the last time I read Vue and IE11 in the same sentence. Actually, I hope this is the last time I read IE11 in any sentence.
- barry27 5y ago
  The difference between a developer I would employ and a developer I would not employ boils down to throw away junk like this. there are plenty of people commenting on here from a Grown Up point of view. maybe read through some of that stuff.
shmiga 5y ago
what is IE11?
- cutler 5y ago
  A browser - Microsoft Internet Explorer version 11.
throwie 5y ago
I still use IE as my default browser (and Firefox as a fallback), for the following reasons: – The font rendering works better for my eyesight. – Killer feature: Ctrl+N/K clones the browser window/tab including the history. I.e. you can effectively fork the history. EDIT: And, equally important, opening a link in a new tab/window also preserves (clones) the history. – Certain keyboard operations have better usability than on other browsers. – The title bar + address/tab bar height height is smallest among all browsers (after some configuration). I’m slowly getting used to the inevitability of migrating to Firefox. The font rendering and especially the clone-by-keyboard feature are the hardest part though. (And the fact that Firefox doesn’t allow yellow as a search highlight color.)
- jazu 5y ago
  There exist several options in about config that let you change some font rendering settings. Have you tried fiddling with them?
- greatquux 5y ago
  Have you looked into https://www.mactype.net/ https://www.mactype.net/ to see if it would help with any of your font rendering issues?
  - throwie 5y ago
    Is there a page somewhere that explains what it does? I’m not a particular fan of macOS font rendering though.
    - greatquux 5y ago
      Then actually it might not help you too much... it's really a replacement font rendering engine for Windows (initially Windows GDI rendering and now they're adding in support for DirectWrite). It uses FreeType with various parameters to make the font rendering look more like macOS (in a nutshell: macOS doesn't use aggressive hinting to force the font shapes into the pixel grid, which makes it blurrier but more accurate on low-resolution screens; Windows does, and so it looks sharper on low-resolution screens). However while looking around at a bug report to get MacType to work in Firefox [0] I came across a setting in Firefox's about:config [1] that can change the font rendering and that might help you out. Not sure about the history forking thing but there may be some Firefox extension to help with that. [0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/673 https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/673 [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652141 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652141
jgalt212 5y ago
What's the biggest thing that IE 11 is missing that gives devs the most grief?
- agloeregrets 5y ago
  It's more like it is so weird compared to everything else. CSS Flex makes some strange choices, CSS Grid isn't, Some layout choices ignore W3C stuff, the JS engine is slower than everything by a huge amount, it's just crap compared to every other browser. Edit: Oh and if you have a large webapp, the F12 developer tools are just a crashfest and are unusable so you can't even debug what IE is doing weirdly.
ajaimk 5y ago
IE11 is the last IE; not sure if people realize that this actually means "We're dropping support for Internet Explorer" and not just a single version.
- onion2k 5y ago
  What difference does that make in practice?
- TheRealPomax 5y ago
  That's literally what most folks have been waiting for for years, I'm pretty sure most web devs are keenly aware of this. However, do note that there is technically also still an IE7 version floating around due to Windows Embedded Compact 2013 not having reached EOL yet (its EOL date is 10/10/2023).
pansa2 5y ago
I'm currently building a website that uses Vue 3 in parts, as well as other features that don't work (well) in IE11 such as CSS Grid. Would you recommend only displaying an error screen for any users who try to view the site using Internet Explorer or another old browser? Or should I let those browsers try to display what they can, and maybe also a warning message?
- InfiniteRand 5y ago
  My two cents is it depends on the nature of the lack of functionality, is this just about not displaying information or is this going to cause data corruption (ie, if validation checks or expected ajax calls are not being made), if it's just the display of things I would probably go with a warning message.
  - pansa2 5y ago
    > if it's just the display of things I would probably go with a warning message Thanks, that's what I was thinking. Is there a standard way to detect whether to show the warning message based on which browser is being used?
    - seumars 5y ago
      There are lot of snippets out there, the most common way would be to target the window.navigator.userAgent, something like: function isIE() { return /Trident\/|MSIE/.test(window.navigator.userAgent); }
      - unilynx 5y ago
        Keep in mind that the code has to compile for checks to work. Eg a ‘let’ in the same script block will break the isIE check too and it’s easy to miss that someone broke it. How often does the ie11 code get tested on ie11.. Best to keep the IE 11 warning code in a separate (nomodule?) script file
- The_rationalist 5y ago
coding123 5y ago
IE11 is supposedly at 1% market share. However, Vue market share is 0.77% of all websites (which is actually huge) Therefore, even for those 1% users of IE11, that's still like 1 of the hundred pages they'll visit in a day. And because so many other frameworks already killed IE11, it's not like those 1% users are going to complain too much more than they would already be, oh shit now 2 of the 100 pages I visit per day are blank!
- dzonga 5y ago
  it will be helpful if you provide links to the stats you pointed out.
swyx 5y ago
I've been keeping a log of the slow death of IE here: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1260627626739130369?s=20 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1260627626739130369?s=20 in the past year, major sites in all categories from linkedin to twitter to skillshare to microsoft to adobe have all dropped IE, with Wordpress, Drupal and Vuejs making plans. The big catalyst I think will be the US government dropping IE support - it only supports browsers above 2% usage (https://github.com/uswds/uswds/issues/3877 https://github.com/uswds/uswds/issues/3877), and we are currently hovering at 2% dropping 0.1% a month https://analytics.usa.gov/ https://analytics.usa.gov/
- dmm 5y ago
  Firefox isn't far behind at 2.6%
  - afavour 5y ago
    Depressing. But on the other hand you don't actually have to do much if anything to support Firefox, unlike IE11 it adheres to web standards.
    - cogman10 5y ago
      And has stayed relatively up to date. That was the biggest PITA with IE is that it would be years behind other browsers in what APIs it supported and you needed a big painful update to the next major version to get new stuff. IMO, MS has really mismanaged the IE product. The fact that there is now a legacy edge is really silly, why did they fork that instead of just making one of the version upgrades be a "Ok, this is a new change to the rendering engine which is fairly major". Their aversion to making anyone unhappy is just silly. Chrome and Firefox have done a much better job with major rendering/js engine upgrades saying "Sorry some things are busted now, get use to it".
      - mumblemumble 5y ago
        My understanding is that they didn't have an option. IE has so many idiosyncrasies that they couldn't make it compatible with modern Web standards and simultaneously retain compatibility with sites that were built for IE. Better to write a new browser so that enterprise clients can use both - one for their legacy apps and the other for new stuff and the modern web - while they get everything migrated over one at a time. Versus, changing IE in place would have forced clients to rewrite everything overnight, which would have been a much, much worse situation.
The_rationalist 5y ago
Webmasters should redirect their IE users to https://browser-update.org/update.html?force_outdated=true https://browser-update.org/update.html?force_outdated=true
justinlink 5y ago
I work on a B2B app with a lot of local govt users. We dropped support officially for IE11 last summer and I was surprised by the little to no pushback. Our stance was if you needed to use IE11 for a legacy application, that's fine -- but our application required something besides IE and you're not limited to only one browser on your computer. Any stances by IT that they haven't had a chance to authorize another browser or prove that another browser was secure compared to IE11 is an absolute joke at this point. Any IT department that is telling users to use IE11 for security reasons is questionable imho.
- munchbunny 5y ago
  Even ignoring non-Microsoft browsers, there's Edge as a still-Microsoft, still-Windows alternative to IE that can be remotely/centrally managed with the same mechanisms. There really shouldn't be any reason to stick with IE11 anymore. The only real remaining argument I can think of for IE11 is if you still have business-critical, legacy ActiveX applications.
  - hhh 5y ago
    There is even IE Mode in Edge for enterprises that truly need something in IE. Automotive industry has a lot of these still. 10-20 apps that are interacted with only work with IE.
- devwastaken 5y ago
  I'm more concerned about older mobile browsers. Almost everyone can install firefox/chrome on older PC's, but plenty are still running old android or non android phones as their only means of a 'computer'.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
    I've got a couple old android devices that won't even load most websites these days. Hell, the play store doesn't even work anymore. It's similar on old apple devices, but not quite as bad.
PeterBarrett 5y ago
We have found that refusing to support IE11 in healthcare environments has lost us 0 customers and given them a reason to move away from it. At this stage any company using it and the likes windows xp or windows 7 are just creating unnecessary security risks.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  I think at this point it would be some US auto-body shop with IE6 hooked up to some internal software, or maybe one of those big Japanese companies that never changes anything at all.
butz 5y ago
Bootstrap 5 released last week also dropped IE11 and "legacy" Edge.
rasputnik6502 5y ago
Vue is great but kind of forces you to build client side single page applications with global root vue component, i also don't like the way it assumes you're running nodejs. What about server side rendering and other web frameworks like aspnet or jsp - any good approaches?
forgithubs 5y ago
Any chance we can keep supporting java applets ? Still need them to fill up my hours.
gregors 5y ago
Microsoft Teams already chopped it, with Office 365 not far behind. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/microsoft-365-apps-say-farewell-to-internet-explorer-11-and/ba-p/1591666#:~:text=Beginning%20November%2030%2C%202020%2C%20the,like%20the%20new%20Microsoft%20Edge https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/mi....
- dmix 5y ago
  That's a pretty big signal to other developers about doing the same and might be the catalyst for Vue choosing to do so...
deergomoo 5y ago
I wondered if this might happen when I first read that they were planning to release a Vue 2.7 backporting some 3.0 features to the 2.x branch. Never seemed much point doing that and an IE port of 3.0, especially considering that 2.x works great on IE (even back to IE9 with transforms and polyfills!) if you absolutely have to support it.
marban 5y ago
Even though I've more or less zero IE11 users on Upstract, I still make sure that everything renders and basically works on it — I think this defensive, vanilla, bare-metal, no-gimmicks mindset creates better and simpler products — in spirit of what old-school Web tech was about. (Unless you're building something like Figma of course).
- paxys 5y ago
  If you think IE11 supports "vanilla, bare-metal" JavaScript or CSS you are going to have a bad time. In fact, if you are building a very simple website most of your code complexity will come from having to support legacy browsers and working around their quirks.
- babypuncher 5y ago
  Modern Javascript and CSS both have features that allow for much cleaner and more readable code. Supporting IE11 seems like a really janky way to enforce code standards.
Lapsa 5y ago
here we go again
userbinator 5y ago
IE11 is basically the last browser that has a sane non-infantilising UI and per-site configuration by default. It works great for the non-JS sites, better than Dillo and Netsurf at least. I use it as a way to say "Fuck the Google monopoly." Firefox is slowly going down that path too, because they haven't a chance at opposing the giant.
- dvdkon 5y ago
  I think you might be better served by something like qutebrowser. Besides, IE will fail on quite a few non-JS websites. For example, pretty much all my websites use CSS grid.
Aeolun 5y ago
At our company we’ve now switched it around. Instead of expending effort making new applications work in IE11, we expend a much lesser effort making legacy applications work in Chrome.

385 points by simon04 5y ago

I definitely think they made the right call here. Even Microsoft is dropping support in Office 365. Commendable, too, that they are working to backport some v3 features to the v2 codebase.

warpech 5y ago

You can't have evolution without dropping ties to the past from time to time. That's about time to drop IE11 to take full advantage of modern Web features.

mwcampbell 5y ago
How much more does the web really need to evolve though? Maybe IE 11 already had all the features that the web platform really needs, and the upgrade treadmill is now being driven by nothing more than our insatiable demand for convenience as spoiled developers. Pity the users who can't keep up with the treadmill.
- rk06 5y ago
  Web needs a lot. Web standards i.e. html,css and js are always evolving and web needs to evolve with it. IE11 is frozen in time. and won't support any newer tech, think about web components, HTTP 3 etc.
- warpech 5y ago
  I agree that for many use cases, IE11 featureset is fine. We jump on the SPA ship too often. I think that static content and server-side rendered apps are often the best option that is for some reason considered out-of-fashion. However, for those who see a Web browser as an application runtime, IE11 should be out of question. Vue is an application framework, and as such, it should benefit from all the improvements in the Web platform implemented in the modern Web browsers.

bearjaws 5y ago

I am counting down the days until our customers stop using IE11, most of them offer the option of IE11 or Edge. We have so little traffic from it now, and the browser renders far slower than Edge / Chrome. Habits are hard to kick in enterprise.

dr-detroit 5y ago
These cats make a 5% raise every year I don't think scumbag IT decision makers will ever die they will soon be able to afford advanced AI constructs to house their consciousness. IE11 will never die screenshot this post its only 2021 right now.

yannoninator 5y ago

Who still uses IE11 anyway?

bovermyer 5y ago
Not sure. Globally, IE has 0.71% browser market share. SOMEONE is using it.
speedgoose 5y ago
Some legacy Windows software are stuck with IE 11 for their webviews.
nextweek2 5y ago
This is an old joke: Those downloading Chrome.
ta988 5y ago
Some lab equipment with internal HTTP servers require IE6 to be configured . And they are still sold... It is almost usable in IE11 but you have to disable tons of safeties.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jackdh 5y ago
Speaking from previous experience it's likely legacy systems built for even older IE's (8,9,10) were patched to IE11 but not any further due to time (money) involved.
goda90 5y ago
I work writing enterprise software. IE is integrated into our legacy desktop client so we can render new web pieces until everything is updated to be web, then we'll switch to Electron for the client. It's a huge pain to get things like CSS to work right, and the dev tools are super buggy.
omh 5y ago
This week I've been dealing with an IE11 related problem from a C# app. The C# app is built using WebBrowser Control[1] which is tightly integrated with the app itself. WebBrowser only supports IE11 but the webapps that it connects to are increasingly dropping support. The vendor is reluctant to upgrade their app because the replacement options apparently (?) require extensive refactoring to get the same integration. IE11 seems to be in a weird limbo. But the fact that it's still technically supported by Microsoft means that conservative software vendors aren't forced to migrate. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/controls/webbrowser-control-windows-forms https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/con...

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago

- Not even supported by Microsoft apps like Teams - Easily less than 1% market share - IE11 is side by side packaged with some version of Edge in almost every case This seems reasonable.

iudqnolq 5y ago
Plus they're backporting features to v2 and making it the new lts

egonschiele 5y ago

I've heard that the people who use IE11 are the ones who don't have a choice, because maybe they are using a computer at a library, or some kind of accessibility-related device. Does anyone on HN know of solid data to back this claim? This screenreader[1] survey for example says 11% of their users use IE11, though that is from 2019. [1] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#browsers https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#browsers

mwcampbell 5y ago
All Windows screen readers with any significant user base have supported Chromium and Firefox for a while now. The old EdgeHTML engine didn't work so well with third-party Windows screen readers, so some blind users may have held onto IE 11 because of that. But any Windows screen reader that works with Chrome also works with the Chromium-based Edge. And note that the WebAIM survey you released was from before the Chromium-based Edge started being pushed to the broader Windows user base. Bottom line: Web developers should not feel obligated to keep supporting IE 11 for the sake of screen reader users.
jayflux 5y ago
People using IE 11 “because they have to” is a hard thing to quantify without some sort of survey. I say this because even though your anecdote rings true, I’ve seen many people in offices use IE 11 purely out of ignorance and comfort reasons rather than because they were forced. They had Edge, Firefox installed but stuck with IE because no one told them to stop using it. We may be underestimating the portion of “if it ain’t broke why fix it” crowd are using IE 11 but it’s hard to say with statistical data alone. Anyway, regardless of how it’s sliced, it’s low enough now for libraries to start dropping.
frereubu 5y ago
We build websites for organisations in the UK who do a lot of work with the NHS, and we regularly still see ~10% visits from IE11 in Google Analytics. Organisations that don’t work with the NHS consistently show < 2%, so although I don’t have conclusive proof I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on for us.

ta988 5y ago

Talking about vue, I'm really waiting for Vuetify to support Vue3. Especially with typescript I feel like the current ways to describe fragments are a bit half-assed.

cuddlecake 5y ago

Coincidentally, Angular is going to deprecate IE11 support with Angular 12, and remove it with Angular 13 https://blog.angular.io/angular-v12-is-now-available-32ed51fbfd49 https://blog.angular.io/angular-v12-is-now-available-32ed51f...

notjustanymike 5y ago
Must be something in the water today. Although I quite like a coordinated attack on my most hated browser, so I'm not complaining.
- TheRealPomax 5y ago
  I don't recall anyone talking about removing support for Safari though.
  - cuddlecake 5y ago
    I'm working with Angular on my dayjob, I wish they'd just deprecate the entire framework
    - cout 5y ago
      Angularjs (aka Angular 1.x) is supposedly being deprecated. There are enough sites out there still using it in production that I'll be surprised if nobody steps in to pick up development.
  - notjustanymike 5y ago
    That, and WKWebView with it's pesky 1GB memory limitation.
nicoburns 5y ago
I find it amusing that people complain about React not being stable enough, and yet it still supports IE9 as Angular and Vue both look to remove IE11 support.

al2o3cr 5y ago

TBH the only reason some clients are all the way on IE11 is because IE10 doesn't support TLS1.2, so they HAD to move to pass a security audit.

dspillett 5y ago
Yep. And "some clients" includes "large companies in the UK's banking industry".

darkhorse13 5y ago

This is obviously great overall, developing for IE is a pain. One weird anecdote though, I have an old laptop that has very little memory, running Windows 10. And I swear, IE11 works better than Chrome and Edge for websites that support it. Chromium seriously seems to crash my computer because of some memory issue. Any idea why this happens (regarding IE performing better)? I only know this because I maintain a CSS framework that supports IE11, so I have to use IE quite a bit.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago
I used to have a similar issue on my laptop. IE was the only browser capable of viewing YouTube videos at 1080p without stutter. Firefox would stutter, as would Chrome and Chromium Edge. I've since given the laptop a clear out, reinstalling Windows 10 and installing Kubuntu as well. The issue has now gone away. Firefox now copes fine from either OS.

jug 5y ago

Heh, so we really ought to move from MSHTML... We're embedding a web browser control in our app for flexibility in adapting the GIS documentation system to varying needs depending on customer. Some customers document more details on electricity meters than others, some tie them to other billing systems on the backend than others. Etc... But it's actually working out great and we can as a bonus update these parts of the desktop app without even shutting it down. Our app has a web API that the scripts interact with. The obvious downside is that it's using IE 11. WebView2 exists though which uses Microsoft's Chromium fork, but the control is only now reaching production quality. Like mere months ago. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ But it'll probably be what we eventually do especially as it supports Windows 7 which is quite something for emerging technology from Microsoft. We need this because surprisingly many customers still have Windows Server 2012 installs here and there. Sounds insane to run 10 year old servers for security reasons but the amazing thing is that Microsoft will support these to late 2023. For now we're in our most advanced scripts using Bootstrap Vue + VueJS 2 + a few polyfills and it's amazed me how seamless it actually is in developing on Chromium 90 and everything just keeps working and looking almost identical on IE 11. Interaction, model bindings, templating, everything. I totally did NOT expect this. I expected... "Support". I mean... This is some achievement. There's been the occasional, minor stumbling block every three months or so but still...

adzm 5y ago
WebView2 is basically CEF for the most part though. I would love for Trident or EdgeHTML to be released as open source honestly. I'm sure there are complicated licensing issues that would prevent this though. I built and helped maintain a relatively complicated application that interacts via the COM interfaces of MSHTML (and the crazy print template stuff) which basically has to be scrapped eventually.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

I have no love for IE, but does anyone remember when we designed web pages to work on any browser?

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
Yes. And it sucked. Lots of extra code and testing.
- bnt 5y ago
  So what's the alternative? Code in Chrome and yolo?
  - greggturkington 5y ago
    The alternative is having a sane process for determining what browsers you support, an a rock-solid QA and release process.
  - Someone1234 5y ago
    They support Edge, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. That's 87.86% of what users are using (per Wikimedia's stats). To support the 1.76% of IE users, it will require a disproportionate amount of work that could negatively impact other development that benefits many more people. That's the reality: Development time is a zero-sum game. If you do this you aren't doing this other thing, and in this case we're talking about under 2% that likely should be discouraged from using it. PS - And this coming from someone whose uses are primarily on IE11 still (see my other post in the thread). Just because I personally benefit from IE11 staying around a few more years, doesn't mean the entire web should bend to that. IE11 must die, we just cannot turn on a needle, and when Edge dropped support for Java Applets/Flash it forced tons of organizations into IE11 for many more years than they would have wanted.
  - dspillett 5y ago
    Code to standards and expect the browsers to implement those standards reasonably. Avoid the bleeding edge to support those held back at LTS versions of common browsers, or if you use new tricks make sure they don't make things unusable on older-but-LTS browsers. Whether you consider IE11 an LTS browser or not is a matter for you to decide (yes, as it will be getting security updates for some time still, or no as it is seven years old, not getting any feature/support updates, and support for it is deprecated by even its own manufacture's apps). Support accessibility by not using fancy things for the sake of it, and if you do something fancy make at least a little effort to have things degrade gracefully for those with accessibility issues. A lot of sites/apps skip this step, but shouldn't.

______- 5y ago

I use IE6 as a sort of litmus test for websites. If a site works in IE6, it's more likely to work on every browser imaginable. Those people creating sites designed to work in the latest browser version only scare me to death.

w-j-w 5y ago
The landscape has changed. Most typical, everyday user have browsers that update themselves to the latest version. Supporting ancient technology (like IE6) doesn't provide a benefit that really justifies the enormous amount of work required. Just let the old browsers die already.
labster 5y ago
Flexbox and block-scoped variables aren’t really that scary. Honestly less scary than the alternatives, nested tables and global variables. Sometimes it’s okay to have nice things.
- asddubs 5y ago
  ie6 doesn't even have inline-blocks. now that's scary
resoluteteeth 5y ago
If you mean that IE6 represents some common set of baseline features that all other browsers will support this is absolutely 100% false. IE6 has tons of quirks and nonstandard features, and sites that are truly written specifically for IE6 and target its features (e.g. activex) and numerous css bugs will simply not work or display correctly in any other browsers at all. Newer versions of IE have to have two separate rendering modes. One of these, "quirks mode," is a non-standard mode that specifically emulates the broken IE6 functionality, because this is the only way to correctly display pages designed for IE6 in a modern browser. On the other hand, people writing new sites in 2021 that support IE are people who are very concerned with compatibility who are being very careful and using zillions of LOC of pollyfills to ensure the sites work in IE. The sites these people create will work in other browsers not because of any property of IE6, but because the people making them also put a lot of work into ensuring they are compatible with other browsers, and dropping support for IE would save a lot of work without reducing compatibility with other browsers.

rk06 5y ago

When looking at IE users, the percentage of users using only IE would be smaller. Especially, since microsoft is now supporting MS edge on windows 10. Moreover even if some old app is using vbscript or some arcane IE only stuff, then they are unlikely to modify the app,let alone adopt Vue.

rubyn00bie 5y ago

I'm not even joking when I say this, for some companies, it would literally be cheaper to buy your IE users a new computer. Obviously, for enterprise customers, who are likely to be the majority of IE 11 users, you can't necessarily do that (though think about if you can).

ipaddr 5y ago
It is not the computer that requires ie11 it awful software like remedy or legacy crystal reports or some professional healthcare vendor product.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  IE pre-Edge is best thought of as a built-in UI library that shipped with Windows, not a browser. When you add that + longevity in deeply integrated enterprise software, everything makes more sense.
  - 7952 5y ago
    You could have some kind of wrapper that installs legacy web sites as a separate app and starts a locked down embedded IE with a set of security policies.
    - woodrowbarlow 5y ago
      derelictron
    - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      That's effectively what the Edge team built for legacy IE app support.
- thatsnotmepls 5y ago
  But if that is the case, why simply not install a separate browser along with IE11?

greggturkington 5y ago

Is anyone working on enterprise-level apps that see a significant number of conversions from IE11 right now? I'm surprised to learn a framework the size of Vue was still supporting it until now.

wubin 5y ago
SAP, one of the largest ERP vendors, is dropping IE support this year for most of their products including legacy ones.[0] And according to SAP, "91% of Forbes Global 2000" are SAP customers.[1] So we can expect enterprises moving to "modern browsers" this year if not done already. I do create B2B apps. Last time I had to support IE11 was 6 years ago. [0]: https://blogs.sap.com/2021/02/02/internet-explorer-11-will-no-longer-be-supported-by-various-sap-ui-technologies-in-newer-releases/ https://blogs.sap.com/2021/02/02/internet-explorer-11-will-n... [1]: https://www.sap.com/why-sap.html https://www.sap.com/why-sap.html

jjice 5y ago

Legitimate question: what companies (I'm assuming it's government) done have Chrome or Firefox installed? What is this IE compatibility caused by?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mkl95 5y ago

I hope this is the last time I read Vue and IE11 in the same sentence. Actually, I hope this is the last time I read IE11 in any sentence.

barry27 5y ago
The difference between a developer I would employ and a developer I would not employ boils down to throw away junk like this. there are plenty of people commenting on here from a Grown Up point of view. maybe read through some of that stuff.

shmiga 5y ago

what is IE11?

cutler 5y ago
A browser - Microsoft Internet Explorer version 11.

throwie 5y ago

I still use IE as my default browser (and Firefox as a fallback), for the following reasons: – The font rendering works better for my eyesight. – Killer feature: Ctrl+N/K clones the browser window/tab including the history. I.e. you can effectively fork the history. EDIT: And, equally important, opening a link in a new tab/window also preserves (clones) the history. – Certain keyboard operations have better usability than on other browsers. – The title bar + address/tab bar height height is smallest among all browsers (after some configuration). I’m slowly getting used to the inevitability of migrating to Firefox. The font rendering and especially the clone-by-keyboard feature are the hardest part though. (And the fact that Firefox doesn’t allow yellow as a search highlight color.)

jazu 5y ago
There exist several options in about config that let you change some font rendering settings. Have you tried fiddling with them?
greatquux 5y ago
Have you looked into https://www.mactype.net/ https://www.mactype.net/ to see if it would help with any of your font rendering issues?
- throwie 5y ago
  Is there a page somewhere that explains what it does? I’m not a particular fan of macOS font rendering though.
  - greatquux 5y ago
    Then actually it might not help you too much... it's really a replacement font rendering engine for Windows (initially Windows GDI rendering and now they're adding in support for DirectWrite). It uses FreeType with various parameters to make the font rendering look more like macOS (in a nutshell: macOS doesn't use aggressive hinting to force the font shapes into the pixel grid, which makes it blurrier but more accurate on low-resolution screens; Windows does, and so it looks sharper on low-resolution screens). However while looking around at a bug report to get MacType to work in Firefox [0] I came across a setting in Firefox's about:config [1] that can change the font rendering and that might help you out. Not sure about the history forking thing but there may be some Firefox extension to help with that. [0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/673 https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/673 [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652141 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652141

jgalt212 5y ago

What's the biggest thing that IE 11 is missing that gives devs the most grief?

agloeregrets 5y ago
It's more like it is so weird compared to everything else. CSS Flex makes some strange choices, CSS Grid isn't, Some layout choices ignore W3C stuff, the JS engine is slower than everything by a huge amount, it's just crap compared to every other browser. Edit: Oh and if you have a large webapp, the F12 developer tools are just a crashfest and are unusable so you can't even debug what IE is doing weirdly.

ajaimk 5y ago

IE11 is the last IE; not sure if people realize that this actually means "We're dropping support for Internet Explorer" and not just a single version.

onion2k 5y ago
What difference does that make in practice?
TheRealPomax 5y ago
That's literally what most folks have been waiting for for years, I'm pretty sure most web devs are keenly aware of this. However, do note that there is technically also still an IE7 version floating around due to Windows Embedded Compact 2013 not having reached EOL yet (its EOL date is 10/10/2023).

pansa2 5y ago

I'm currently building a website that uses Vue 3 in parts, as well as other features that don't work (well) in IE11 such as CSS Grid. Would you recommend only displaying an error screen for any users who try to view the site using Internet Explorer or another old browser? Or should I let those browsers try to display what they can, and maybe also a warning message?

InfiniteRand 5y ago
My two cents is it depends on the nature of the lack of functionality, is this just about not displaying information or is this going to cause data corruption (ie, if validation checks or expected ajax calls are not being made), if it's just the display of things I would probably go with a warning message.
- pansa2 5y ago
  > if it's just the display of things I would probably go with a warning message Thanks, that's what I was thinking. Is there a standard way to detect whether to show the warning message based on which browser is being used?
  - seumars 5y ago
    There are lot of snippets out there, the most common way would be to target the window.navigator.userAgent, something like: function isIE() { return /Trident\/|MSIE/.test(window.navigator.userAgent); }
    - unilynx 5y ago
      Keep in mind that the code has to compile for checks to work. Eg a ‘let’ in the same script block will break the isIE check too and it’s easy to miss that someone broke it. How often does the ie11 code get tested on ie11.. Best to keep the IE 11 warning code in a separate (nomodule?) script file
The_rationalist 5y ago

coding123 5y ago

IE11 is supposedly at 1% market share. However, Vue market share is 0.77% of all websites (which is actually huge) Therefore, even for those 1% users of IE11, that's still like 1 of the hundred pages they'll visit in a day. And because so many other frameworks already killed IE11, it's not like those 1% users are going to complain too much more than they would already be, oh shit now 2 of the 100 pages I visit per day are blank!

dzonga 5y ago
it will be helpful if you provide links to the stats you pointed out.

swyx 5y ago

I've been keeping a log of the slow death of IE here: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1260627626739130369?s=20 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1260627626739130369?s=20 in the past year, major sites in all categories from linkedin to twitter to skillshare to microsoft to adobe have all dropped IE, with Wordpress, Drupal and Vuejs making plans. The big catalyst I think will be the US government dropping IE support - it only supports browsers above 2% usage (https://github.com/uswds/uswds/issues/3877 https://github.com/uswds/uswds/issues/3877), and we are currently hovering at 2% dropping 0.1% a month https://analytics.usa.gov/ https://analytics.usa.gov/

dmm 5y ago
Firefox isn't far behind at 2.6%
- afavour 5y ago
  Depressing. But on the other hand you don't actually have to do much if anything to support Firefox, unlike IE11 it adheres to web standards.
  - cogman10 5y ago
    And has stayed relatively up to date. That was the biggest PITA with IE is that it would be years behind other browsers in what APIs it supported and you needed a big painful update to the next major version to get new stuff. IMO, MS has really mismanaged the IE product. The fact that there is now a legacy edge is really silly, why did they fork that instead of just making one of the version upgrades be a "Ok, this is a new change to the rendering engine which is fairly major". Their aversion to making anyone unhappy is just silly. Chrome and Firefox have done a much better job with major rendering/js engine upgrades saying "Sorry some things are busted now, get use to it".
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      My understanding is that they didn't have an option. IE has so many idiosyncrasies that they couldn't make it compatible with modern Web standards and simultaneously retain compatibility with sites that were built for IE. Better to write a new browser so that enterprise clients can use both - one for their legacy apps and the other for new stuff and the modern web - while they get everything migrated over one at a time. Versus, changing IE in place would have forced clients to rewrite everything overnight, which would have been a much, much worse situation.

The_rationalist 5y ago

Webmasters should redirect their IE users to https://browser-update.org/update.html?force_outdated=true https://browser-update.org/update.html?force_outdated=true

justinlink 5y ago

I work on a B2B app with a lot of local govt users. We dropped support officially for IE11 last summer and I was surprised by the little to no pushback. Our stance was if you needed to use IE11 for a legacy application, that's fine -- but our application required something besides IE and you're not limited to only one browser on your computer. Any stances by IT that they haven't had a chance to authorize another browser or prove that another browser was secure compared to IE11 is an absolute joke at this point. Any IT department that is telling users to use IE11 for security reasons is questionable imho.

munchbunny 5y ago
Even ignoring non-Microsoft browsers, there's Edge as a still-Microsoft, still-Windows alternative to IE that can be remotely/centrally managed with the same mechanisms. There really shouldn't be any reason to stick with IE11 anymore. The only real remaining argument I can think of for IE11 is if you still have business-critical, legacy ActiveX applications.
- hhh 5y ago
  There is even IE Mode in Edge for enterprises that truly need something in IE. Automotive industry has a lot of these still. 10-20 apps that are interacted with only work with IE.
devwastaken 5y ago
I'm more concerned about older mobile browsers. Almost everyone can install firefox/chrome on older PC's, but plenty are still running old android or non android phones as their only means of a 'computer'.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
  I've got a couple old android devices that won't even load most websites these days. Hell, the play store doesn't even work anymore. It's similar on old apple devices, but not quite as bad.

PeterBarrett 5y ago

We have found that refusing to support IE11 in healthcare environments has lost us 0 customers and given them a reason to move away from it. At this stage any company using it and the likes windows xp or windows 7 are just creating unnecessary security risks.

rsj_hn 5y ago
I think at this point it would be some US auto-body shop with IE6 hooked up to some internal software, or maybe one of those big Japanese companies that never changes anything at all.

butz 5y ago

Bootstrap 5 released last week also dropped IE11 and "legacy" Edge.

rasputnik6502 5y ago

Vue is great but kind of forces you to build client side single page applications with global root vue component, i also don't like the way it assumes you're running nodejs. What about server side rendering and other web frameworks like aspnet or jsp - any good approaches?

forgithubs 5y ago

Any chance we can keep supporting java applets ? Still need them to fill up my hours.

gregors 5y ago

Microsoft Teams already chopped it, with Office 365 not far behind. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/microsoft-365-apps-say-farewell-to-internet-explorer-11-and/ba-p/1591666#:~:text=Beginning%20November%2030%2C%202020%2C%20the,like%20the%20new%20Microsoft%20Edge https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/mi....

dmix 5y ago
That's a pretty big signal to other developers about doing the same and might be the catalyst for Vue choosing to do so...

deergomoo 5y ago

I wondered if this might happen when I first read that they were planning to release a Vue 2.7 backporting some 3.0 features to the 2.x branch. Never seemed much point doing that and an IE port of 3.0, especially considering that 2.x works great on IE (even back to IE9 with transforms and polyfills!) if you absolutely have to support it.

marban 5y ago

Even though I've more or less zero IE11 users on Upstract, I still make sure that everything renders and basically works on it — I think this defensive, vanilla, bare-metal, no-gimmicks mindset creates better and simpler products — in spirit of what old-school Web tech was about. (Unless you're building something like Figma of course).

paxys 5y ago
If you think IE11 supports "vanilla, bare-metal" JavaScript or CSS you are going to have a bad time. In fact, if you are building a very simple website most of your code complexity will come from having to support legacy browsers and working around their quirks.
babypuncher 5y ago
Modern Javascript and CSS both have features that allow for much cleaner and more readable code. Supporting IE11 seems like a really janky way to enforce code standards.

Lapsa 5y ago

here we go again

userbinator 5y ago

IE11 is basically the last browser that has a sane non-infantilising UI and per-site configuration by default. It works great for the non-JS sites, better than Dillo and Netsurf at least. I use it as a way to say "Fuck the Google monopoly." Firefox is slowly going down that path too, because they haven't a chance at opposing the giant.

dvdkon 5y ago
I think you might be better served by something like qutebrowser. Besides, IE will fail on quite a few non-JS websites. For example, pretty much all my websites use CSS grid.

Aeolun 5y ago

At our company we’ve now switched it around. Instead of expending effort making new applications work in IE11, we expend a much lesser effort making legacy applications work in Chrome.