8 ms·

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 st

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.
  - waheoo 5y ago
    This is such an utter failing of the ecosystem. It's why I call out bullshit whenever I hear Android is Linux.
    - throwaways885 5y ago
      Android is Linux, even if it doesn't follow the philosophy of your favourite Linux distributions. Maybe RMS had a point when suggesting people call it GNU/Linux. Maybe Android/Linux?
      - Kye 5y ago
        It's more like Google Play Services/Linux these days.
        gtk40 5y ago
        Yes, it's a very different experience running Android with Amazon's setup on a Fire Device than on with Google Play Services, even if it's binary compatible.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        Yep: GNU/Linux is very different from busybox/Linux is still different from Android/Linux, because the userland is (often) more important than the kernel; a user of Debian GNU/Linux has more in common with GNU/kFreeBSD than Android/Linux.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
      It's also a symptom of a wasteful greed driven system. By abandoning old hardware the industry at large can quietly force people into 'regular' upgrade cycles. That's two years for their ideal consumers who trade in their old phones and get the latest. At most it's like 6-8 years before the hardware is simply too old to possibly keep running. Many frugal people run a cycle or two behind, eg they're on iPhones (or model year equivalents) 8-11 currently depending on their cycle timeline. There's no way out of the cycle. I had a few coworkers get dropped by their cell providers over the last few years as the carriers dropped support for cell phones they bought in the 20xxs. Essentially this planned obsolescence is manufactured consent in the population wide crowd funding of cellular technologies by for profit (mainly public) companies providing essential communication services. I'll leave the moralizing of this to philosophers, but all these dynamics and their externalities undeniably bear further scrutiny.
- gruez 5y ago
  don't androids use chrome by default, which can be updated through the play store?
  - zild3d 5y ago
    think it depends on the manufacturer. Samsung ships with their own (chromium) browser
  - ccouzens 5y ago
    Chrome requires android 7 (about 5 years old). Firefox requires android 5 (about 7 years old). Very old phones don't get browser updates. https://m.apkpure.com/google-chrome-fast-secure/com.android.chrome https://m.apkpure.com/google-chrome-fast-secure/com.android.... https://m.apkpure.com/firefox-browser-fast-private-safe-web-browser/org.mozilla.firefox https://m.apkpure.com/firefox-browser-fast-private-safe-web-...
    - skissane 5y ago
      How many people use 5+ or 7+ year old phones? I’m sure they exist somewhere but I don’t know any of them. It isn’t hard to get a 2-3 year old phone for free. A lot of people buy a new phone every 2-3 years and many of those people will be happy to give away their old phone if someone they know needs one
      - petschge 5y ago
        I do. Because I live in an area where I need to use CDMA. Sure, there is a couple of spots in town that have other cell phone networks as well, but in a lot of spots and basically all buildings you need to use Verizon (or one of the resellers) or be without a cell signal. And sure they have LTE as well, but AFAIK the initial connection to the network is always over CDMA. And except for google maps (that freezes my phone for minutes, but is easily replaced by Osmand) and the banking app for one of my banks (I'd probably use that once a year to deposit a check because THAT technology is also not dead yet), there is nothing that doesn't work well on my Android 6 Samsung J1 Luna.
      - 5y ago
- luke2m 5y ago
  It’s usually a certificate issue: if you install Firefox things should mostly work.
- rk06 5y ago
  Edge is also available on android. I don't know if it supports older android versions though
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Not an issue for enterprise though, really.
- tanaypingalkar 5y ago
  yes , i also use a old phone which is probably 5 year old which only supports 1 of 10 websites. The chrome crashes all the times that is why i always use pc. The mobile phone market is growing quickly and we have to updates every month. Even window's needs to update montly. But still there are lot of people who wont buy new phone's every year but smartphone brands will never understand.
leipert 5y ago
Same thing happened at GitLab when we dropped IE11 support last May. No pushback or feedback from users at all: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/197987 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/197987
- justinlink 5y ago
  Yep -- I thank those who fought that battle back in 2017-2019, as by time we got around to it, it was nothing. I bet we spent more time talking about if we should do it, when, and messaging than our support team has dealt with customers trying to use IE11. It still comes up, we had a question this week from an IE11 user, and they just let them know to use another browser and they always do. There is no fight left in the IE11 user base.
  - godman_8 5y ago
    Hopefully with Microsoft's aggressive updating policies in Win10 old Edge will be killed off soon. We'll be sitting pretty when it comes to web standards. Safari lags behind but not by much.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      > We'll be sitting pretty when it comes to web standards. You'll be sitting pretty on standards, or you'll be able to just target Chrome and forget about standards?
      - kungito 5y ago
        Exactly, what a ridiculous statement from GP. Now it seems like the web might end up in webgl canvases anyways
    - pjerem 5y ago
      In our team, every time there was a bug in Safari, it was something awfully wrong in our code that just happened to work on Chrome/FF for mysterious reasons. I never had a problem on Safari with standard quality code.
some-guy 5y ago
I work at a large enterprise company for their front-end. We have noticed that US domestic IE11 usage has dropped significantly, but has remained constant in Asia. Unfortunately some of our larger customers require us to support IE11 until its official security EOL (2025).
phendrenad2 5y ago
It was always a joke honestly, the kinds of customers who mandated IE11 were always more trouble than they were worth, even when IE11 was current.
- hateful 5y ago
  Every time in the past where I had to switch to IE11 in order to use a site, I would always say out loud: "This site requires an insecure browser."
dathinab 5y ago
I think the following two fact that played a big role in it: 1) Microsoft has another "official" browser 2) Chrome "eats the world", many people use it at home and many sites only officially support chrome. In many ways chrome has become the new IE. (Sites relying on non standardized Chrome specific quirks and being broken on other browsers, especially if they are not at least partially chromium based.)
- cezart 5y ago
  I recently got actually burned by this. I was implementing the redesign for a friend’s website. I was working in Firefox, cause that’s the browser I want to support. The page seemed pixel perfect to me. Then my friend told me there was a subscription form he didn’t want at the bottom of the page. What was my suprise when I found out that there was an entire partial with an html error in it, that I missed in code, which was rendered in Chrome, but it was not rendered at all in Firefox.
  - drewzero1 5y ago
    I've been a Firefox user since version 2 and experienced this kind of thing early on. Years ago I was making a GeoCities page and thought it would be a great idea to add a little picture/icon that followed the pointer around on the webpage (because that was a "cool feature" offered on the site builder at that time). I couldn't get it to work no matter which picture I tried, and I kept trying to add them many more times before eventually giving up on it. Some time later I wanted to show off the site to a family member on their computer. I pulled up Internet Explorer (because they didn't have Firefox) and navigated to my webpage, where I was greeted by a swarm of icons following the pointer around and slowing the whole computer to a drag. Lesson learned, test on multiple browsers because people will probably view your site in multiple browsers.
josephcsible 5y ago
"Questionable" is an understatement. Anyone who requires or suggests IE for security reasons in 2021 is incompetent.
- babypuncher 5y ago
  Anyone who requires or suggests IE for ANY reason in 2021 is incompetent.
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    I could see a competent person suggesting it for use as a honeypot for attracting malware, but not for use as a browser.
acdha 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. I think the big part is that Microsoft wasn't just aggressive in pushing Edge but _especially_ emphasizing that IE11 was nowhere near as secure. Large bureaucratic organizations have a lot of inertia but they're getting a lot of pressure, especially at the federal level, to step up security and that overrides a lot of the familiar stalling tactics.
kiawe_fire 5y ago
When I first started with my current company, old IE support was driven by our customer’s IT departments not having other browsers installed. We’re now sort of unofficially NOT supporting IE 11 in so much as new features don’t get tested until someone complains. What’s been interesting is that all of our government employees’ IT do have Chrome, Edge Chromium, and sometimes even FF installed, but the individual users are still trying to use IE11, and often will not accept “you must use one of the other browsers that you have available” as an option. We’ve even gotten support tickets from customers about “broken features” which then acknowledged in their email that “they tried in Chrome and it worked”. One incident even acknowledged they had to use Chrome for other internal apps, but preferred to use ours in IE. We SHOULD be pulling our support fully for it, because literally every customer has their choice of browser installed. But users are so used to their IE they refuse to use anything else, and my boss seems to be happy accommodating that.

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.
- waheoo 5y ago
  This is such an utter failing of the ecosystem. It's why I call out bullshit whenever I hear Android is Linux.
  - throwaways885 5y ago
    Android is Linux, even if it doesn't follow the philosophy of your favourite Linux distributions. Maybe RMS had a point when suggesting people call it GNU/Linux. Maybe Android/Linux?
    - Kye 5y ago
      It's more like Google Play Services/Linux these days.
      - gtk40 5y ago
        Yes, it's a very different experience running Android with Amazon's setup on a Fire Device than on with Google Play Services, even if it's binary compatible.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Yep: GNU/Linux is very different from busybox/Linux is still different from Android/Linux, because the userland is (often) more important than the kernel; a user of Debian GNU/Linux has more in common with GNU/kFreeBSD than Android/Linux.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
    It's also a symptom of a wasteful greed driven system. By abandoning old hardware the industry at large can quietly force people into 'regular' upgrade cycles. That's two years for their ideal consumers who trade in their old phones and get the latest. At most it's like 6-8 years before the hardware is simply too old to possibly keep running. Many frugal people run a cycle or two behind, eg they're on iPhones (or model year equivalents) 8-11 currently depending on their cycle timeline. There's no way out of the cycle. I had a few coworkers get dropped by their cell providers over the last few years as the carriers dropped support for cell phones they bought in the 20xxs. Essentially this planned obsolescence is manufactured consent in the population wide crowd funding of cellular technologies by for profit (mainly public) companies providing essential communication services. I'll leave the moralizing of this to philosophers, but all these dynamics and their externalities undeniably bear further scrutiny.
gruez 5y ago
don't androids use chrome by default, which can be updated through the play store?
- zild3d 5y ago
  think it depends on the manufacturer. Samsung ships with their own (chromium) browser
- ccouzens 5y ago
  Chrome requires android 7 (about 5 years old). Firefox requires android 5 (about 7 years old). Very old phones don't get browser updates. https://m.apkpure.com/google-chrome-fast-secure/com.android.chrome https://m.apkpure.com/google-chrome-fast-secure/com.android.... https://m.apkpure.com/firefox-browser-fast-private-safe-web-browser/org.mozilla.firefox https://m.apkpure.com/firefox-browser-fast-private-safe-web-...
  - skissane 5y ago
    How many people use 5+ or 7+ year old phones? I’m sure they exist somewhere but I don’t know any of them. It isn’t hard to get a 2-3 year old phone for free. A lot of people buy a new phone every 2-3 years and many of those people will be happy to give away their old phone if someone they know needs one
    - petschge 5y ago
      I do. Because I live in an area where I need to use CDMA. Sure, there is a couple of spots in town that have other cell phone networks as well, but in a lot of spots and basically all buildings you need to use Verizon (or one of the resellers) or be without a cell signal. And sure they have LTE as well, but AFAIK the initial connection to the network is always over CDMA. And except for google maps (that freezes my phone for minutes, but is easily replaced by Osmand) and the banking app for one of my banks (I'd probably use that once a year to deposit a check because THAT technology is also not dead yet), there is nothing that doesn't work well on my Android 6 Samsung J1 Luna.
    - 5y ago
luke2m 5y ago
It’s usually a certificate issue: if you install Firefox things should mostly work.
rk06 5y ago
Edge is also available on android. I don't know if it supports older android versions though
breakfastduck 5y ago
Not an issue for enterprise though, really.
tanaypingalkar 5y ago
yes , i also use a old phone which is probably 5 year old which only supports 1 of 10 websites. The chrome crashes all the times that is why i always use pc. The mobile phone market is growing quickly and we have to updates every month. Even window's needs to update montly. But still there are lot of people who wont buy new phone's every year but smartphone brands will never understand.

leipert 5y ago

Same thing happened at GitLab when we dropped IE11 support last May. No pushback or feedback from users at all: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/197987 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/197987

justinlink 5y ago
Yep -- I thank those who fought that battle back in 2017-2019, as by time we got around to it, it was nothing. I bet we spent more time talking about if we should do it, when, and messaging than our support team has dealt with customers trying to use IE11. It still comes up, we had a question this week from an IE11 user, and they just let them know to use another browser and they always do. There is no fight left in the IE11 user base.
- godman_8 5y ago
  Hopefully with Microsoft's aggressive updating policies in Win10 old Edge will be killed off soon. We'll be sitting pretty when it comes to web standards. Safari lags behind but not by much.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    > We'll be sitting pretty when it comes to web standards. You'll be sitting pretty on standards, or you'll be able to just target Chrome and forget about standards?
    - kungito 5y ago
      Exactly, what a ridiculous statement from GP. Now it seems like the web might end up in webgl canvases anyways
  - pjerem 5y ago
    In our team, every time there was a bug in Safari, it was something awfully wrong in our code that just happened to work on Chrome/FF for mysterious reasons. I never had a problem on Safari with standard quality code.

some-guy 5y ago

I work at a large enterprise company for their front-end. We have noticed that US domestic IE11 usage has dropped significantly, but has remained constant in Asia. Unfortunately some of our larger customers require us to support IE11 until its official security EOL (2025).

phendrenad2 5y ago

It was always a joke honestly, the kinds of customers who mandated IE11 were always more trouble than they were worth, even when IE11 was current.

hateful 5y ago
Every time in the past where I had to switch to IE11 in order to use a site, I would always say out loud: "This site requires an insecure browser."

dathinab 5y ago

I think the following two fact that played a big role in it: 1) Microsoft has another "official" browser 2) Chrome "eats the world", many people use it at home and many sites only officially support chrome. In many ways chrome has become the new IE. (Sites relying on non standardized Chrome specific quirks and being broken on other browsers, especially if they are not at least partially chromium based.)

cezart 5y ago
I recently got actually burned by this. I was implementing the redesign for a friend’s website. I was working in Firefox, cause that’s the browser I want to support. The page seemed pixel perfect to me. Then my friend told me there was a subscription form he didn’t want at the bottom of the page. What was my suprise when I found out that there was an entire partial with an html error in it, that I missed in code, which was rendered in Chrome, but it was not rendered at all in Firefox.
- drewzero1 5y ago
  I've been a Firefox user since version 2 and experienced this kind of thing early on. Years ago I was making a GeoCities page and thought it would be a great idea to add a little picture/icon that followed the pointer around on the webpage (because that was a "cool feature" offered on the site builder at that time). I couldn't get it to work no matter which picture I tried, and I kept trying to add them many more times before eventually giving up on it. Some time later I wanted to show off the site to a family member on their computer. I pulled up Internet Explorer (because they didn't have Firefox) and navigated to my webpage, where I was greeted by a swarm of icons following the pointer around and slowing the whole computer to a drag. Lesson learned, test on multiple browsers because people will probably view your site in multiple browsers.

josephcsible 5y ago

"Questionable" is an understatement. Anyone who requires or suggests IE for security reasons in 2021 is incompetent.

babypuncher 5y ago
Anyone who requires or suggests IE for ANY reason in 2021 is incompetent.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  I could see a competent person suggesting it for use as a honeypot for attracting malware, but not for use as a browser.

acdha 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. I think the big part is that Microsoft wasn't just aggressive in pushing Edge but _especially_ emphasizing that IE11 was nowhere near as secure. Large bureaucratic organizations have a lot of inertia but they're getting a lot of pressure, especially at the federal level, to step up security and that overrides a lot of the familiar stalling tactics.

kiawe_fire 5y ago

When I first started with my current company, old IE support was driven by our customer’s IT departments not having other browsers installed. We’re now sort of unofficially NOT supporting IE 11 in so much as new features don’t get tested until someone complains. What’s been interesting is that all of our government employees’ IT do have Chrome, Edge Chromium, and sometimes even FF installed, but the individual users are still trying to use IE11, and often will not accept “you must use one of the other browsers that you have available” as an option. We’ve even gotten support tickets from customers about “broken features” which then acknowledged in their email that “they tried in Chrome and it worked”. One incident even acknowledged they had to use Chrome for other internal apps, but preferred to use ours in IE. We SHOULD be pulling our support fully for it, because literally every customer has their choice of browser installed. But users are so used to their IE they refuse to use anything else, and my boss seems to be happy accommodating that.