Microsoft might like to think so, but until all our business clients agree with them, the real IE is still a significant limiting factor in deploying with any JS feature you can't effectively polyfill.
Okay, but that's an upgrade issue, not a dead-end issue like a lot of people would assume from being told that there's no plans to add it to Internet Explorer.
Features get added to new versions, not old versions. Organisations using old versions will need to upgrade to new versions to get the new features. That's true of anything. It just happens in this case that Microsoft decided to go from Internet Explorer 11 to Edge instead of going to Internet Explorer 12. Saying that there's no plans to add support to Internet Explorer is like saying there's no plans to add support to Firefox 50 – true in a technical sense, but in practice, of course they add new features to new versions rather than old versions, and of course organisations have to upgrade.
It's not just an upgrade issue. Many organisations aren't running Windows 10 and so have no browser upgrade path to Edge at all. Many organisations still have an older version of IE, probably IE11 but sometimes earlier, as their standard desktop browser.
Experience tells us that those organisations aren't in a hurry to upgrade their standard desktop deployment just to get a new browser so web developers can play with the shiny new toys. Did we learn nothing from the XP and IE6 era?
So it's all very well talking about newer JS features, but pragmatically, you can't just wish away the need for compatibility with browsers more than a year or two old if your target audience is businesses, governments, or other large organisations.
There's an unhealthy complacency among parts of the web dev community, as if something being available in the latest Chrome canary now means it can be used everywhere. That's just not how a distributed system works when you don't fully control the client.
Even if it were, you're not just going to retrofit something as significant as multi-threaded architecture into most existing JS code bases. Outside the HN bubble, not everyone gets to start a greenfield JS project every six months.
I think aphextron's original comment was fair and realistic: as a practical matter, even with the rapid pace of change in the JS ecosystem, we still can't use a lot of day-to-day features in JS that would be routine in most other modern programming languages.
> It's not just an upgrade issue. Many organisations aren't running Windows 10 and so have no browser upgrade path to Edge at all. Many organisations still have an older version of IE, probably IE11 but sometimes earlier, as their standard desktop browser.
That's an upgrade issue. They are using older software and a feature you'd like to use is being added to a newer version of that software. Yes, upgrades aren't always convenient or timely, but it's still just an upgrade issue, not a technology you have to give up on because two major browser vendors aren't interested in developing it.
> So it's all very well talking about newer JS features, but pragmatically, you can't just wish away the need for compatibility with browsers more than a year or two old if your target audience is businesses, governments, or other large organisations.
I'm not wishing away the need to support older versions. I'm just saying that this is something we'll be able to use eventually, not something we'll never be able to use because two major browser vendors refuse to implement it. It's an upgrade issue.
Well, OK, but by that argument almost anything is just an upgrade issue, so I'm not sure that really gets us anywhere.
In particular, it doesn't solve the practical problem that even with all the recent developments in the JS ecosystem, as things stand today a lot of front-end web developers don't have access to language features and programming techniques that are widely available in other environments.
Unfortunately, this is just an inherent problem in the way that web tools have been repurposed for more general software development: the developers don't control a significant part of the infrastructure, so they will always have to code to the least common denominator among their target market.
> Well, OK, but by that argument almost anything is just an upgrade issue, so I'm not sure that really gets us anywhere.
That makes no sense. My argument is very narrow, clearly applies here, and I don't see how it applies to "almost anything".
> In particular, it doesn't solve the practical problem that even with all the recent developments in the JS ecosystem, as things stand today a lot of front-end web developers don't have access to language features and programming techniques that are widely available in other environments.
That doesn't really have much to do with what I've been saying.
Maybe we're talking at cross-purposes, but you seem to be saying that
(a) it doesn't matter that there was no support for a feature planned for IE, because it is planned for Edge
and
(b) IE and Edge are essentially the same browser, and one is just the upgrade for the other.
I contend that this is what Microsoft's marketing department would like everyone to think, but the reality in larger organisations (and for those developing web sites and apps aimed at those organisations) is that they are two completely different browsers. In many cases, the only way you can "upgrade" from one to the other would be literally upgrading the entire organisation's standard desktop environment, including the OS.
If you're going to contend that a missing feature in one product is only an upgrade issue because you can change the entire OS and then install a completely different product to do the same job and then get that feature then I don't know what wouldn't be "just" an upgrade issue.
For all practical purposes, Edge is the next version of Internet Explorer. New features aren't being added to Internet Explorer 11, only to Edge. Yes, Edge has higher system requirements than Internet Explorer 11, but that's not relevant to my point. The same was true of Internet Explorer 9, which didn't run on Windows XP, but that didn't mean Internet Explorer 9 wasn't the next version along from Internet Explorer 8 or that it was "a completely different browser" or "a completely different product". It just means it's got higher system requirements, that's all.
The only thing the higher system requirements mean in practice is that the timetable for upgrading is delayed for some organisations. Those that aren't on Windows 10 will upgrade later than those that are. This means that it's not a blocker for using service workers, just a pretty typical delay while we wait for organisations to upgrade. As I keep saying, it's just an upgrade issue.
Saying that Microsoft aren't adding support for service workers to Internet Explorer while leaving out the massive fact that this is because Internet Explorer is the legacy version and they are adding it to the next version along, Edge, gives a radically different impression to what is actually happening. It implies that we'll never be able to use service workers because a major browser vendor isn't supporting it, when the reality is the opposite – that Microsoft are adding it to the next version of their browser and that all web developers have to do is wait for people to upgrade.
This is then compounded by the claim that Apple are doing the same thing – which is also untrue. Apple are adding service worker support to Safari right now, you can even go and look at the code yourself.
Yes, I understand that in terms of IT operations, the upgrade from Internet Explorer 11 to Edge is not without its complications. But it doesn't matter to the point I'm making. This is an upgrade issue, not a "multiple browser vendors have killed service workers" issue.
> If you're going to contend that a missing feature in one product is only an upgrade issue because you can change the entire OS and then install a completely different product to do the same job and then get that feature then I don't know what wouldn't be "just" an upgrade issue.
Changing from a previous version of Windows to Windows 10 is an upgrade. Changing from a previous version of Internet Explorer to Edge is an upgrade. It's quite clear why I'm calling this an upgrade issue, and I don't see how you can think that logic applies to things other than upgrades.
An example of what wouldn't be an upgrade issue is what I am explicitly contrasting against here. Two major browser vendors refusing to implement service workers wouldn't be an upgrade issue. If Microsoft and Apple won't add support for service workers to their browsers, then developers can't just wait for people to upgrade because newer versions won't include support either.
That's why it's so relevant to say "hang on, that's not right, both Microsoft and Apple are adding support to the latest versions of their browsers". It's the difference between service workers eventually being usable with a great deal of cross-browser support, and service workers being dead outside of small niches.
Microsoft might like to think so, but until all our business clients agree with them, the real IE is still a significant limiting factor in deploying with any JS feature you can't effectively polyfill.