IE 11 is still supported by Microsoft because it is tied to Windows 10 support.
If you're B2C you can probably ignore that and just not support it, but if you're B2B where you're selling not to users it's very hard to get away from supporting IE11.
If your users never directly interact with you (for example you sell white-label software which gets resold) then you just can't control your end-user tech stack enough.
If you're selling to partners who sell to companies who push out logins to their customers or user base then even if <1% of users use IE 11, that becomes 5% of companies having a user with it, which becomes 30% of the partners who are asking for IE11 support.
It's one thing to turn down 1% of users it's quite another to annoy 30% of your income stream.
As long as bootstrap 4 is supported (and the legacy bootstrap 3 support suggests it will be) then this doesn't have to be a problem of course, just one more thing to be aware of.
I'm fortunate enough to be in the B2B where our customers are generally less tech inclined so we can actually say "You really shouldn't use IE, download this." and they actually do it. And our customers customer's are even less technically inclined, and they do it too.
Some even come back with feedback "Hey this other stuff works now!"
I like to think we're helping make the world a better place ;)
Granted while the leverage is nice, supporting those customers can be a bear.
I have exactly the opposite experience with B2B. We’re working with financial institutions and large dealers and what they use is typically white listed and controlled by an IT department. Typically, they can’t just change and use whatever they want. You must be talking about small businesses?
They will whitelist super old known insecure java versions / windows versions etc that can NEVER change. I remember having to downgrade to windows 7 to access one VPN setup (yes - to get through the security firewalls you had to downgrade the entire stack to something the "security" firewall handled). I think this all was in part because they don't patch / update, so some stuff (flash / activeX etc) just doesn't work well on a modern machine
Ironically, they also would let their key domains expire but thankfully folks just would call a helpdesk and get an IP address to use (but these domain endpoints were 100% being hit by downgraded / unpatched machines so if someone had purchased the domain it would have been bad news).
For some places that were not inside an agency we had had to keep the "secure" machine separate from the actual network because it was the most vulnerable.
Thankfully, the help desk was so overwhelmed with calls about this horribly fragile system that they would reset anyone's password over the phone, so user lockouts were easy to handle, call up, ask that so and so's password be reset to XXXX and done (virtually no authentication other than knowing what number to dial). This was critical because the passwords had to be changed every 30 days and were insanely complex - we had lockouts even though folks thought they'd written them down properly right next to the machine (cap / lower / number / letter confusion issues?).
Meanwhile, my google account has proper two factor authentication, can be accessed from most any modern device, rate limits and screens login attempts in a smart way, and I haven't had to change my password in 15 years (so I could pick a hard one I don't use elsewhere).
Can verify this to be 100% true. I think that you are even downplaying a bit . I worked for a consulting company in India and the client was a bank. They had specific ancient setups that worked only on windows 7 and nothing else. We couldn't even compile the java monolith sometimes because the maven dependencies didn't wanna fetch. It compiles for 1.5 hours. Junior devs like me could never go through that code or the setup. It was an absolute nightmare. It's one of the main reasons why I moved on to front-end as the feedback loop was instantaneous.
Then we had to develop most of the times in a virtual desktop so the frame rates were like 10fps and getting animations right was notoriously hard. Now the backend seemed like a cake! I quickly moved out of there and I'm much happy about that decision!
The thing is that stuff like exact versions, super outdated software (especially browsers), changing passwords every N days and making it unique is a part of being allowed to pass some kind of security audits.
If you combine paranoid-level security with non-technical and often lazy users, and add cost-cutting all around, you get something like described here.
I know that from my father working in the IT department of a large corporation.
Uh? Many govt agencies care that they can monitor what you do if they want and that you CANNOT connect securely to the web without going through a MITM SSL proxy in some cases.
They are sold this as a virus filtering requirement or something like that.
But some agencies literally decrypt everything going out (and then re-encrypt) - talk about a security and privacy risk!
Staff can use personal phones to check bank balances, do messaging etc if they have any sense at these places.
Thankfully this all died WAY WAY down with certificate pinning - thank you google! Seriously, when the execs got the warnings from google chrome the decrypt everything situation died at a lot of places.
Google's history on securing users using chrome is not bad (if you are dealing with old IE etc chrome is basically heaven by comparison in terms of security and patch velocity)
Having said that some are pretty well known large companies, but the business units that sort of operate on their own if only due to their archaic nature. The company has a policy, it just doesn't always apply to them.
I always found logistics interesting. Moving stuff around efficiently seems to be a real art. Many opportunities to use data. We use a few different logistics companies and I kick around the idea of bringing it in house sometimes.
The catch seems to be managing all the different data that isn't comparable, but should be.
Like every logistics organization does something some weird way (carrier, client, end customer, everyone's accounting...), they're sure it is the right way, and then the next one does it the "right way" another way and now nothing is a 1:1 ;)
Lots of old / skewed / strange practices that requires a lot of unexpected maintenance / changes. It's easy to end up swimming in a lot of bad / not equivalent data.
Ditto, and what's worse is when those white lists conflict with other requirements, such as "must work on latest Chrome version" but there's no way to test that without making a production release, because on the internal networks you're only able to use the whitelisted version, which is usually months to a year behind, and even that's an exception made specifically for devs because otherwise you should really be using IE. When pointing this out the answer typically goes like "well, try your best I guess?"
I doubt many enterprises upgraded to those, though. Even regular consumers hated the interface upheaval, and enterprises are extra sensitive to those kinds of changes.
Not just financial institutions. Allowing any user to install anything on their computers is dangerous from an IT Security perspective and tends to lead to chaos.
In my experience (looking at error log hit rates vs customer service inquires) the vast majority of people do not contact customer service when a website breaks and would never get that advice.
It typically happens in small companies that can't afford an IT department. Any large company has made enough experience to take install rights away from most users.
Because many of our users access our systems using embedded browsers in EnterpriseTM Software, we have to support IE8.
B2B can mean you're locked in to supporting things you otherwise wouldn't.
IE8 support adds significant cost and effort, but because of our customer profiles, we must maintain it. Our leadership understands the issues and is working to change the situation, but the inertia in this field can be astoundingly hard to overcome.
Doesn’t Microsoft advise against using IE11 because of security reasons, except for critical internal applications that only support IE11? [0] It’s mind blowing to me that companies continue to use an insecure browser, to the point of insisting on it.
Why can’t vendors refuse to support IE11 on the grounds that it’s a security risk? If you reframe the problem to “IE11 is insecure,” surely customers will adapt?
Developing for Chrome is not an unreasonable ask and many vendors are asking for it these days. Any new service should get minimal resistance.
At my org we use Chrome or Edge as the default and define ie11-only sites in group policy. When you navigate, IE11 pops up automatically.
As an aside a company I used to work for was so underwater on tech debt that instead of modernizing their site they repackaged IE9 as a citrix app that business partners had to run. People are willing to overlook a lot when the commissions are good and that was not the worst thing I have seen in the insurance space.
We recently transitioned to Chrome and use IE Tab on predefined sites. It’s a good compromise of standardizing on a modern browser and still being able to access a couple straggler apps.
What's the motivation to use Chrome and IE Tab v. MS Edge (where the Chromium-based product supports IE Tab-like functionality natively)? Or just long enough ago before the Chromium-based Edge shipped?
Prior to Microsoft’s change of engines, or at least around the same time. Plus it isn’t like anyone wanted to use IE or Edge, so we would of likely gone the same path regardless.
It's not clear to be Chromium-based Edge is an any worse product than Chrome (and in many ways is going further down the anti-ad-tracking route than Chrome, unsurprisingly), but I expect the Trident integration in their IE Mode is better than IE Tab?
I doubt anyone is using Edge enough to find out. Generally now people are trained to Chrome regardless (most people home and work), and w/the IE Tab extension there is no motivation to investigate.
As a side note, I would guess most non-GSuite users are logging into their Google account on Chrome and getting a unifed bookmark, whereas if they sign into a MS account at work/Edge, it will have to be their work Office365 account, breaking their unified browsing experience.
To Firefox's credit, generally you don't need to. Almost everything I work with, outside of bleeding-edge experimental features, ends up in a setup where I write something for chrome and it works flawlessly in Firefox. And safari. It's only IE where solidly "old, tried and true" browser features end up breaking down in bizarre and interesting ways.
The only reason we have this big conversation about "supporting" different browsers is because one single holdout has been that bad for so long.
And to even MS's credit, I think a large part of that has been the fact that they're not "evergreen" (i.e forcing all users to be on the current version). They've always been doomed by the fact that "what they're judged on" isn't their current work, but is usually the version that's _almost a decade_ out of date.
We have GPOs for it and it is in our software center but no external vendor I know of specifies it as a hard requirement like they do chrome or IE.
If I have to ticket a vendor for a website issue their call taker is going to ask if I'm using their favorite browser. desktop management is 20% tech and 80% bureaucracy.
This stuff happens over time. It is a result of cascading dependencies.
Companies have lots of pieces of software that they support for extended periods of time. Also, they typically avoid requiring users to use different browsers for different applications. The number of support calls goes up dramatically if you need users to use different browsers, and it causes usability headaches when linking from one system to another, because you can only have one default browser. If you bring a piece of enterprise software into any organization, they will want you to target the browser they're using.... so, targeting IE was written into the requirements well after it was a good idea, because legacy compatibility was required. That, of course, works until MS throws a wrench in the works and discontinues the browser.
SaaS will change this somewhat, because the software is continually updated by the vendor. It's mainly on-prem and/or custom applications that cause this issue, because they don't get upgraded until big bucks are dished out.
> The number of support calls goes up dramatically if you need users to use different browsers, and it causes usability headaches when linking from one system to another, because you can only have one default browser.
Which is precisely why Chromium-based Edge has an IE Mode that uses Trident for given sites so that those legacy systems can be filtered to use a different browser engine from within the same browser UX.
Good to know -- I personally haven't dealt with this issue in the past few months (or years), but hopefully this will give some organizations a path forward.
Between ~2010 and the January release of Edge this year, a lot of organizations were dealing with the scenario I outlined.
Although as recently as this month, I've run into scenarios where Chromium-based Edge acts a bit differently than Chrome... so it's not a solid solution in all cases.
> Although as recently as this month, I've run into scenarios where Chromium-based Edge acts a bit differently than Chrome... so it's not a solid solution in all cases.
I mean the Edge team will treat any such case as a bug if you report it.
That's different. A web browser is an interface to the outside world which executes arbitrary foreign code as a regular course of operation. Any IT department that forcibly limits people to use the world's least-secure browser in an effort to keep things secure is utterly failing in its job.
If you’re losing a sale because your software doesn’t work in IE11, maybe your software isn’t actually all that good.
I understand some companies insist on IE11, but companies insist on a lot of “requirements” that aren’t actually necessary if you push back on them. When the rubber hits the road, if your software is truly the best/only option, they can find a way to use a secure browser to access it.
I work for a relatively large B2B company and we’ve managed to convince the business to drop support for IE11 and Edge (the EdgeHTML rendering engine version). It was just a matter of pointing out the development cost and using analytics to show that very few of our users uses either browser.
The clients I work for are all still worried about losing business due to dropping IE11...so we don't.
They have no analytics on which devices generate income, so it is hard to have that conversation. We know that IE11 hovers around 3% for most of our sites, and I doubt that many of those hits come from legitimate users, let alone someone who is going to purchase something.
Somehow the large FinTech company I work for dropped support for IE 11 and just asked employees to use Chrome. Even users still on Windows 7.
We run a few customer portals and a customer facing ticketing system. Until now I’ve never been able to rid myself of IE 11. It’s very nice. Small banks aren’t so happy.
Or they’ve been successful in marketing this as a security requirement. That carries a lot of weight in .gov and anything involving finance, medical data, FERPA, etc. has a pretty solid argument for pushing secure clients since it’s free and easy.
Friend is in one the top 3 law firms in the world. They have a corporate Chrome rollout, since at least one of their web apps requires a current browser.
Not to mention that if your software sends out emails with links to your application, chances are high that your client's email client (Outlook) will open the links in the default browser (which still might be IE).
So even if you can convince them to use a different browser, be prepared to tell them how to configure the browser to be the default one.
That's interesting. Part of why we started supporting IE is because some of our most important users somehow ended up on our website in IE, despite not normally using IE. Wonder if this is the only reason why.
In 2015 I was writing a brand new web frontend for IE 5.5 on a mobile device with something like 240x360 screen dimensions (I forget the details now) for one of the most valuable companies in the world. We had complete control over the devices the users used (the company gave the users those devices). Admittedly, plans were in place to upgrade those devices, but it was still a fair bit out. I left before that happened.
IME, the IE11 users have all been able to use another browser. We send them to version of our site that includes all the right polyfills and allows signups/browsing marketing but NOT using the main app.
When users arrive on IE11 and need to use the app they are always able to fire up chrome/Firefox/edge.
The only users with an old browser and won't/can't upgrade have had win7 + ancient Firefox.
IME, the IE11 users have all been able to use another browser.
Then your company must not have any customers in security-conscious industries like healthcare.
Any well-run IT department doesn't just allow the company's employees to install and run any old browser they want because a web site told them to do so.
I am forced to support IE11 because a very large number of doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare providers use it. These people cannot simply "fire up chrome/Firefox/edge."
It's not very security-conscious of them to continue using IE11. These healthcare companies are being incredibly irresponsible by continuing to use an insecure and outdated browser; even going against Microsoft's own recommendation in doing so, as I understand it. By supporting IE11 your company is helping to enable the healthcare industry to continue using insecure software.
A well-run IT department should be able to provide its users with a modern and secure browser. Why does your definition of a well-run IT department include the requirement that software installations should be restricted, but not a requirement to avoid using insecure and outdated software?
I believe one can make a compelling case that the continued use of IE11 within the healthcare industry is unethical, as it provides a known attack vector by which people's data can potentially be stolen. Stop giving them a pass on this.
Yes, I'd have to ask those users to log in with their iPhone :)
Seriously though, the IT-only-allowing-IE11 hasn't been a sales or support blocker in the last couple years, as it has been for me in previous companies 5+ years ago, but YMMV
Every site like Stack Overflow or Google Docs that doesn't work with IE11 helps convince decision makers that maybe their IT department should actually get with the times
Not always. Some places use ActiveX or npapi. I know one place which the security system uses a java8 applet. The functionality has been remove from other browsers. I wish if MS provided a way on edge to run some webpages in IE. At least then we could isolate problematic webpages that use plugins while have rest run on edge.
We're mostly a voice application so with WebRTC being a requirement to our application we've completely dropped support for IE11 and Edge (pre chromium)
We've had to maintain support for Safari which has been very problematic since they initially released WebRTC support but not exactly bug free. That said it's a joy to develop for the web now without worrying about IE
I have been helping maintain and update an online fabric store. If anybody is going to be using ie11, it’s old people with old computers buying fabric for things. I think it’s still 7% of the larger market, no? I don’t see how stores can just ignore 7% of users unfortunately
However, there's a big difference between 4% of users and 4% of market. Not everybody out there is a customer, and not all customers buy equally. So the revenue falloff sill surely be smaller.
Typical browser stats also don't account for what people do if something doesn't work. Having browser issues surely will cause some lost sales. But even the least tech-savvy of people will try something on another device, like their phone, or ask somebody to do it for them. Making the revenue impact even smaller.
Note that all the browser market share data shows a distinct difference between weekday and weekend browser market share: IE has way more market share during the week.
Since it's open source, it sounds like companies who get 30% of their money from IE users should start giving enough back in time and money that Bootstrap does what they need. That, or look up parables on gift horses and little red hens.
Personally I feel the correct solution for ie is to have stuff polyfilled and transcompiled by the user. So js libs, you also transcompile the libraries also and provide the polyfills.
It's different for all kinds of of markets, in the markets we deal with (primary industries), our experience is, a lot of IE11 users are users with a lot of $ who have a lot of infrastructure built around older tech. The old tech keeps working fine, which is great in many ways. So, I think unless Microsoft kills it, IE11 is still the minimum for widest adoption. However, for my side projects, I just care about the evergreens.
> IE 11 is still supported by Microsoft because it is tied to Windows 10 support.
And slow to adopt banks who's check scanner software STILL depends on some ie11 feature. Edge support is coming "soon" which apparently includes the past 3 or 4 years.
Personally I’m hopeful for the day when Edge becomes default. I believe it’s still able to use the older engines for compatibility, but not having to code for Trident for default Windows users would be so nice!
(Chromium) Edge has an "IE Mode" where it uses Trident for specified sites. Very clearly the move here is to get enterprise clients using Edge internally, as it means they have a modern browser on the public web but can maintain compatibility with internal IE-only systems.
I expect Trident is a very long way from being killed, if it ever is. I expect it'll remain around for much the same reason as many of the old Windows APIs have.
Imagine a world not too far away where Credge is the only browser accessible and IE tab is available there but doesn’t open unless there’s a flag on a site to say “use IE Tab”
My company has a few SaaS apps that really only work in Chrome. I would say Chrome is a more prevalent corporate browser than IE11 at this point.
The biggest issue with IE11 from a corporate IT support perspective is that it is not cross-platform so it adds another platform to test and validate against. Most organizations have to support some level of Mac usage for software developers and executives, so it makes more sense to officially support only a single browser.
I. Rename IE11 something like "MS ActiveX Runtime For LOB Network Apps" (AXR for short) or something like "MS ActiveX Player".
II. Create an MMC console entitled "AXR Domain Manager" that identifies a list of domains that open in AXR instead of the default browser. This list is controllable via group policy and other MS management tools.
III. Modify IE where if a website not in the aforementioned list is accessed, a popup saying "This site will be opened in your default browser" appears and the link opens up in the default browser.
It would make it so much easier to explain to non-technical people that IE11 is really a legacy app engine at this point and shouldn't be used for modern website usage.
> If you have specific websites and apps that have compatibility problems with Microsoft Edge, you can use the Enterprise Mode site list so that the websites open in Internet Explorer 11 automatically. Additionally, if you know that your intranet sites aren't going to work correctly with Microsoft Edge, you can set all intranet sites to automatically open using IE11 with the Send all intranet sites to IE group policy.
I think the point is to do the reverse - if somebody does run IE11 directly (rather than Edge), and tries to open a website that is not in the system-wide whitelist, it forces them to use Edge.
There are still companies in Europe I work with that use IE11.
Since we switched from jQuery to Vue last year, we put a friendly reminder on each page saying IE11 is not supported (since its ES6 support sucks), but the tickets still came in. Finally we installed a header on all B2B sites that pops a modal error saying please don't use IE11. The tickets stopped abruptly. I was expecting complaints, but the majority of them already have alt browsers installed, so instead of asking, in this case forcing them to use a different browser worked much better.
Won't this be great when Google and everyone else kills off the user agent header? 5 years from now, there'll be no forcing/detecting users with old ipads, chromebooks or phones.
Does it matter that newer browser versions are freezing the user agent? Microsoft will never remove it from IE11, so you can always detect IE to show a modal popup.
I wonder how many of these ancient legacy systems are content to stay on IE because everyone coddles them with support? Chicken and the egg kind of thing. Why invest the time and money to modernize if devs will bend over backwards to keep them on life support?
More likely it's because no one wants to pay to upgrade the hundreds of barely supported in-house apps their company has that only run on IE 11 in compatibility mode.
The people making the decision judge their personal risk to be higher if they initiate the change than if they stick with the status quo, even with the chance that it causes a major breach—they might not get blamed for that, anyway. Same as most business decisions.
Not sure. At least in my experience, the people demanding that their apps keep working on IE11 are not the people who care about what framework we use to build the apps.
It depends on your user base. Sometimes you must coddle because the users are still high on your active user reports and not supporting them is a choice between killing off that user base or keeping them.
For instance if your business model is to sell to/support highly regulated industries or govt users you are effectively forced to support their current user base configs or lose that share of the market because the choice for them is deal with a huge change to their requirements and support (which move at a glacial rate) OR chose a different vendor for your provided service.
Especially because the ones to make that call may not know that their business apps support other web browsers. We sell some tools, which also work on IE11 but definitely on other web browsers. Do our clients know that? I wouldn't know, and wouldn't count on it.
Why? Their plan for bootstrap v5 at the moment is just some cleanup to fix mistakes they made and remove the jquery dependency. I dont see the reason for these goals to not support ie11.
As much as i hate ie11 we have to still support it as its used in many businesses using our softwares
I think it makes sense to formally drop the IE dependency in versions sooner than when you’re making changes that actually break IE.
Besides, replacing jquery May indeed be why they chose to drop IE right now. One of the biggest selling points of jquery, and one of the biggest contributors to its heaviness, is cross browser support including IE.
As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach.
> As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach.
And if you can polyfill, that is good way to drop support for ie11. Personally instead of support ie11 out of the box, have have create custom build or expect them to do polyfilling themselves. This way they can optimize for the remaining browsers.
Knowingly being locked into an older version of a technology is bad omen, e.g., security. Granted, it is bootstrap, and we're talking about IE 11. But some XSS issue might pop up that doesn't get patched in pre-Bootstrap v5.
And with time, your product that's built on Bootstrap v4 (or earlier) is only going to continue decaying.
As a provider, supporting old tech stacks sucks. They're clunky, have all kinds of warts and annoying workarounds for stuff that got improved in future versions.
As a consumer, being told my light bulbs won't work with the new fixture is a great reason to no longer work with that provider.
As a provider that knows this, I'd rather support the old tech stack right up to the point my ability to keep the lights on isn't at risk.
Reading through the changeset[1], this isn't a minor "some styles out of line" update, they're removing a number of polyfills that were there to only serve IE11 that affect many of their core components. Without testing it out, I would expect most components that use Javascript for functional enhancements to be broken. Most of the style changes are fairly minor and nothing you couldn't fix as you go, but the script changes are breaking changes.
IE 11 legacy support is a dream compared to having to support IE 8 and lower back in the day. The JS engine on IE 9 was about 10X faster than the one on IE 8.
Never underestimate an IT departments ability to not give a fuck. I once got a bug report from a colleague complaining about our website not working in Firefox. I couldn't reproduce it locally, so I got to her computer and realized that Firefox updates (?!) had been blocked. Everyone in that department was stuck on Firefox 12, when the current version was 60+. Turns out that not even evergreen browsers are safe from overzealous policies.
And this was on a pretty big media company with a large digital footprint.
At least govt side sometimes the staff either don't know or don't have a budget so once something works they've learned to absolutely lock everything down has hard as they can so it can't be messed up. This is partly because vendors willing to deal with a govt procurement cycle often are selling total junk (for high prices).
Some crucial thing was broken on Firefox 13, so they blocked the autoupdate. Nobody ever opened a ticket about re-checking if it's still broken on Firefox 14..
What made the change for us is libraries dropping support and us having to upgrade those libraries to be in compliance with our security audits. It's a good thing and more libraries need to force the issue.
We were almost forced to find another library or write our own but we were able to find articles where Microsoft had said publicly that they no longer consider IE11 a browser and it shouldn't be used. It saved our hides.
I don't very much whether this will make much of a difference. Most devs very rarely ever upgrade the version of boostrap once it is in place, on intranet sites. One of the sites my friend supports is built in bootstrap 2.
Typically if 25% of my users use IE11, I will just make sure it works with IE11. If I have to stay use an older version of the library I will just use that unless I can polyfill or patch the lib to work with older versions of IE.
Then again I am kinda strange in the fact that if it should work in an old browser (and time permitting) I will normally make sure it works well enough that it is functional in that browser.
Are those users forced to use it? Or is it by choice. I spearheaded an effort at my org to restrict access to IE on all PC's that didn't absolutely need it. Which, turned out to be nearly everyone.
Unfortunately, lots of users (mostly older) still associate the internet with "Internet Explorer". Simply telling them to use Chrome or Firefox solved the issue in a lot of cases.
Don't forget the fact that some (how much ?) users visit websites with IE because it's the default browser on their entreprise setup, but admins have installed Firefox alongside for compatibility with modern websites.
So dropping IE is almost a service for them.
Source : french administration with thousands of employees.
I'm even not sure what an average experience on IE11 would be for any users.
I push as much as I can to POs / stakeholders to just disable non-critical features on IE11 and just leave the basic functionality.
I doubt anyone using IE11 likes that fact, so sounds good to give them just another reason to complain about their experience to their superiors. I will definitely never see "The product that just works on IE11" as a slogan, so being competitive in this won't be reasonable argument.
Ha, my office's intranet is MS SharePoint, the menu is broken in Chrome. I sent them the CSS to fix it (unnecessary divs are added, you just need the right selector and you can display:none them all) ... worked fine in IE11, apparently that's justification for a WONTFIX (fixed it for myself with uBlock).
Lots of emails come around saying use/don't use IE11 for this operation because half the time it doesn't work, and half the time the sites being linked aren't standards compliant.
What are some good alternatives for developers who don't want to lose 2,39% (or whatever the current MSIE11 market share is) of their visitors/revenue?
Bulma claims 90% compatibility with IE11 at least. Foundation 6 seems to support IE9+.
Absolutely! that's why I build IE11-compatible marketing pages and signup... once they are past the first step of the funnel, the back button isn't as tempting :)
Right now its the same front end stack (Vue, BS4) for both sites, and re-build and re-test for IE11 infrequently, so we're not paying the cost constantly.
Exactly. In fact, for some domains, supporting IE11 can mean losing money. There is the technical cost, but also the support cost which tends to be higher.
Why aren't IE users considered more when thinking about accessibility? The best practice is to incorporate a11y accessibility standards to accommodate the small percentage of users who use screen readers and/or have color blindness/other disabilities. Why are we so quick to drop IE11 support when supporting users with disabilities is just as much work if not more? And possibly are a smaller percentage of users than IE users? You'll never read "Bootstrap stops supporting screen readers and removes aria tags in v6".
By extension, can we classify IE usage as a disability? Only half joking: I imagine a lot of current IE users are either doing it because of work or because they are technologically illiterate.
Nobody likes to support IE11 but dropping support moves Bootstrap 5 from "just use Bootstrap" to "Bootstrap has tricky pitfalls". Before someone can use Bootstrap 5 they need to be sure and confident that they don't need IE11 and never will.
IE11 was supplanted by Edge years ago. Windows 10 ships with Edge preinstalled (it comes with both, but you're not stuck with IE). Windows 7 and older are no longer supported by MS. The only in-between is Windows 8 which everyone hated so I doubt it has a huge market share, especially in enterprises which are the only ones who might be "stuck" with the browsers that come preinstalled on the OS.
IE11 lives on because many corporations run software that requires it.
There's a network effect, because links don't open the a browser that's compatible with the destination, but in the same browser as the link. So the corp with one IE11 app wants to serve their intranet home page in IE11, and so they want everything to run in IE11.
There are mitigations and migration paths, but that's all swimming up-stream -- it incurs risk, and costs time and money -- so it happens slowly and only in spots.
To use Bootstrap 5 you have to answer this question: are corporations my customer, or could I ever pivot to a business strategy where corporations are my customer?
If you don't care about money, then you can just answer no if you want, and you'll be fine.
But the consumers you can reliably insist run modern browsers don't pay for websites (not directly), so if you are running a business you are either committed to an ad-driven model, physical goods model, with no b2b option, or you're going to keep IE11 in-play.
I just don't think most people want to make a far-reaching commitment about the nature of their future business before they develop their first web page. (They do it all the time, but not on purpose!) A framework like bootstrap should free you from coming to grips with all that, but bootstrap 5 pushes it into your face before you are probably ready for it.
My point is that they almost certainly have both IE and Edge installed. It's entirely possible to continue using IE for their legacy app and use Edge for everything else. In fact if their IT department cares at all about security, it should be pushing them to do so.
> To use Bootstrap 5 you have to answer this question: are corporations my customer, or could I ever pivot to a business strategy where corporations are my customer?
> If you don't care about money, then you can just answer no if you want, and you'll be fine.
You come off as weirdly bitter and hostile here.
Obviously when you choose tech, you have to weigh the pros and cons. It's part of our job. Why is it not our job when picking the foundation framework for our web client?
If you need IE11 support you can stay on Bootstrap 4 (we're still using Bootstrap 3!) or any of the other CSS frameworks. What's the problem?
Also, most people aren't in a position where they might accidentally take on corporate business in the future, either. Seems like a weird niche position to hammer on. And if you were in that position yet you chose a framework that, what, only works in Firefox unstable nightly, then you made a bad call and maybe you'll learn from the decision. So what?
Seems like weak reasoning for Bootstrap to never push the envelope when there is still Bootstrap 3 and 4 available. That's why they cut a new brand each time instead of just bumping semver on the same Bootstrap product. Every major version hop is basically a new framework.
Our enterprise app has similar numbers (20 million unique monthly user sessions). There’s literally nothing we can do about it either—if a large number of Fortune 500 customers say we must support it, we have to keep supporting it, period.
It has gotten to the point where IE11 in a VM is my main browser for testing and debugging.
It depends. At work we decided to not support IE11 for a product and all the users understand that they need to use something else than IE. So the breakdown is pretty much 0% for IE.
It's another story if you are selling, but if the users must use your application, they will click on the other blue e icon.
Unless of course the "other" blue E icon is unavailable because they are on Windows 7 without administrative rights to install Chromium Edge, or Edge has been flat out disabled through group policy.
Well that's the point of the parent commenter though, right? How do you intend to support IE11 while using Bootstrap 5, even if the client offers to pay you?
If they really insist, they will be quoted a rewrite to another framework, plus more because we will hate to do that.
In practice we find solutions, such as installing chrome or using mobile devices. I know it depends on the domain and the country, but companies with outdated desktop pc running only internet explorer are becoming rare. We prefer to refuse one of them than wasting time supporting outdated environments.
Is there any good reason to disable Edge through group policy?
I'm more receptive to backwards compatibility concerns than some in the thread. But when IT admins have new software available, disable and block it arbitrarily, and then complain that new services aren't supported by the old software, I lose my patience.
The only reason anybody has ever given me for disabling Edge is that users find it confusing. If you haven't educated your users on Edge and feel that they are only appropriately trained for IE for the past 5 years, you're not really trying to roll forward with the industry and you're going to be left behind due to your own stupidity. No sympathy.
which may make sense for sites that have a 2% ie11 userbase (which may even be the case for bootstrap project sites as the user base hitting those sites are many technical users!), however sites in-the-wild have dramatically different user bases to support I manage many brands marketing sites for instance and we see low single digit % ie11 users all the way up to 40% userbases depending on the specific audiences for those sites.
If the bootstrap team is looking at their (or even average) ie11 %'s to determine if they should drop support they are really making that decision blind. It would instantly take bootstrap from a viable framework on many sites to a deal breaker.
Absolutely not. Those who still use IE11 have to have a hard deep look at their bullshit requirement. We can't keep support for insecure and obscure technology because someone somewhere might still use it. This type of bullshit makes it even harder to build safe & reliable software.
Good lord, looks like I’ll have to wait a few years to use this update then. We have a decent amount of legacy browser users that need support. Wish that Bootstrap supported these still widely used browsers. Had the same problem with v4.
As long as people don’t have a reason to change, they won’t. I say you drop support now and consider yourselves lucky that you can ditch your more difficult and problematic customers.
I mean, of course, I know this isn’t a realistic course of action for everyone. But I wish it was.
It is usually the difficult and problematic enterprise customers using IE11 that also pay the most money. The choice between ditching customers and ditching a framework is not usually difficult.
Agreed, keeping your customers supported is #1 priority. This is a super hard lesson for many new engineers as they always want to use the latest and greatest bleeding edge tech. Unfortunately that want rarely aligns with the businesses needs.
This sounds like a terrible idea. Most of the reason to use a framework like Bootstrap is to avoid dealing with cross browser issues, looking at you IE
It seems IE11 has become the new Python 2.7. I can only hope one day MS decides to pull the plug entirely, it can't run any new JS features and is clinging onto life.
Eventually, the web will just break (for example, http/3), and IE will be forced to retire.
We just need the "right" pieces to break before it can retire in peace.
IE has become a tech debt that often corporations running an enterprise web app older than 10 years have to bear.
I have clients who's web applications refuse to work on Chrome/Firefox and mandates the use of IE11 for proper functioning.
Bootstrap needs a modern browser, but modern browsers don’t need bootstrap.
Seriously: 90% of the value of bootstrap was homogenizing browsers and making horizontal positioning easier. Both these issues have improved dramatically, with browsers converging and CSS Grid becoming available, respectively.
At this time, bootstrap offers little more than a somewhat more opinionated set of margins and other defaults than what browsers ship with, plus some higher-level components.
This has less to do with "modern browsers" and more with how the site was designed and the opportunity cost of switching.
Why would the developers of a Bootstrap-based site that works fine overhaul it completely for CSS Grid, which has far less backwards compatibility? What would be the benefit?
Bootstrap is more than just a layout grid, it's also a UI framework, so abandoning it would mess up things like tabs, accordions, modals, etc.
Using Bootstrap isn't going to make your site less accessible or less secure.
Using vanilla JS instead of jQuery doesn't require refactoring the site's layout and changing every page template. And even then, a decision like that wouldn't be made unless there were significant QoL improvements in terms of site speed or maintainability.
That is why BS5 can afford to drop jQuery as a dependency. Developers working on highly performant apps where ops/second matters would already be using vanilla JS, and that's what BS5 is trying to support with this; jQuery doesn't play well with React/Vue after all.
But devs that are working on CMS-style websites, which make up the majority of actual websites on the internet, can continue to use jQuery if they want to.
I didn’t mean to suggest that people should invest time to remove bootstrap. Only that Bootstrap offers far less now than it did in the past, and shouldn’t be considered the default option when starting any new project.
Among the downsides is its size, obviously. I also consider the html it encourages among the ugliest things since the invention of PHP. This is from the documentation:
<button type="button" class="btn btn-dark">
Classes such as “col-sm” are little better than style=“...”. While accessibility seems to have improved over the last years, my intuition is this happened in spite of the idea of semantically meaningful HTML being abandoned and not because of it. I used to worry about this, but had to abandon that particular fight for the sake of my mental health at about the time someone decided to name one of these frameworks “semantical”.
But with CSS Grids and Flexbox, layout has become just as easy and actually more flexible than using Bootstrap. Why would you add code and become pigeonholed into one framework when you could archive the same using vanilla CSS?
> Why would you add code and become pigeonholed into one framework when you could archive the same using vanilla CSS?
It's open source and can be forked and modded to your heart's content. How is that being pigeonholed?
Most developers don't work at companies where they roll their own UI components, and have QA and accessibility experts that can determine if their in-house accordions, modals, etc. are ARIA compliant.
The business case for switching over has to go beyond "it's vanilla CSS", especially if time can be better spent improving the user experience or product features.
This debate seems out of place given that it's been belabored since CSS frameworks became a thing.
But consider how CSS files easily become append-only junk drawers. And you may have to scour arbitrary files just to see what CSS affects this one button on this one component on this one page. And even if you find the CSS that you think affects the html node, you have to open your browser and use inspect element to see if there's anything that cascades over it. Meanwhile, a simple class doesn't lie.
And CSS doesn't even have native mixin reusability like `.form button { @mixin button } `.
There are clearly trade-offs here. For example, it's a huge deal when modifying complex UI to see these classes inline and being able to change things in a single file without the indirection of a CSS file.
You can get a chip on your shoulder about your arbitrary views on what is right and wrong, but people clearly find these non-semantic classes useful. I've worked at a company that had very purist views on how CSS should be written where there were almost no classes in the html, and it was very hard to make large UI changes without credentializing in multiple CSS files. There is no free win.
> At this time, bootstrap offers little more than a somewhat more opinionated set of margins and other defaults than what browsers ship with
Some of us need opinionated defaults like these in order to ship something that looks decent. Can you suggest an alternative set of opinionated defaults?
I make sure my website is still 100% functional in IE11: Using only .jpg and .png (I don’t use .gif on my website) for images; not using too much Javascript; using .woff instead of .woff2 webfonts; text-shadow instead of text-stroke to give one font an outline look; etc.
If I was building a node website which depended on a bunch of packages from developers who may or may not care about IE11, this would not be possible. But since I’ve done the entire design by hand with HTML and CSS for over a decade, I can keep it IE11 compatible without issue. Also, everything works if Javascript is turned off, and there are reasonable (if not great) fallback fonts for users who disable webfonts.
I support the second half of your comment. All websites (webapps excluded) should strive for as little JS as possible. It isn't all that hard to support IE11 for most things, if you aren't doing anything super crazy with your design.
The first half though...we have grateful degradation for this reason. There's no reason to serve larger woff fonts to all users when it is so easy to use it as a fallback, preferring woff2 when supported. There are a lot of simple ways to improve the experience and data consumption for modern devices without sacrificing functionality in IE11.
In my experience, the fastest way to serve a web font stack is via base64-encoded web fonts in a single “font” CSS file; it’s more raw bytes but fewer requests. To do it this way requires having all of the web fonts be in the same lowest common denominator format, which is .woff.
I also add about 10k to the combined font stack file by adding hinting which is only seen on 75dpi displays, because too many users are still using low resolution monitors.
The main reason I use woff fonts and their approximately 120k size is because the days of “font-face: Verdana” giving (almost) everyone the same looking website are a thing of the past with Android smart phones everywhere.
I'd be very careful recommending this method for loading webfonts. By Base64 encoding your fonts into a CSS file you are adding 1000's of bytes into a browsers critical path (since CSS is render blocking). You are also removing the browser ability to choose the most optimum font it supports (i.e. one with better compression like WOFF2). Requests are cheap, especially when using HTTP/2 (which multiplexes over a single TCP connection).
If you do use this method, I highly recommend testing both the standard loading method vs Base64 method on a low spec device (e.g. Moto G4 via WebPageTest) and seeing which performs best for your website.
Speed is about the same on my system: 370ms from hitting reload to having the fonts downloaded when using inline CSS; 415ms from hitting reload to having all of the woff2 fonts downloaded when using external resources (I should point out the inline CSS actually has two more fonts). As I recall, the speed difference was more pronounced when I tried this a few years ago.
I have had issues with a single font file sometimes hanging when trying to load it, so having them all in one file is also more stable; I plan on getting new hosting soon who will hopefully not have those kinds of issues. I also very aggressively cache the font file so it is only loaded once every six months for people who have been to my web page before.
It’s possible to avoid having base64 fonts block the loading of the page by putting the relevant <style>@import url('/fonts.css');</style> at the bottom of the page, at the expense of having a “flash” before the font is loaded.
I enjoyed reading the linked blog entry. One thing which stuck out is how you guys are able to interact directly with the type foundry to get them to make the web fonts smaller. I don’t have that luxury, but I do very aggressively subset my fonts, and I use zopfli with its most aggressive compression setting when making the WOFF fonts. I also use the Bitstream Charter font for italic and bold serif text, since that particular font is a very nice looking open source webfont with a very small size (download time) footprint. The main body text of Bitstream Charter is a little too thin (thin strokes) on Windows + Chrome (but it looks fine in IE, older Edge, and Firefox) especially on low DPI displays, so I use its (using more space and longer load time, alas) sister Charis SIL, a Bitstream Charter variant with thicker strokes, for the main body text.
One final thought: I think I still have an old Moto G3 with WiFi I can use to test things on that platform.
The second half of what you're saying is just standard web development practise. And as for the rest... everyone has to make a judgement call. Do you still support IE8? Presumably not. As the percentage of users with a browser drops the amount of development work required to support it means you drop it. For a lot of us the number of IE11 users (< 1%) means it simply isn't worth the time.
(also, please let's cut it out with the "young developers" stuff. I've been around long enough to see lazy developers both young and old.)
To answer your question: My site still works in IE8, but with minimal CSS. It works in IE7 and IE6 with, albeit without CSS (except for my online resume), so it gracefully degrades. I have been phasing out IE8 support through the 2010s; in 2012 I went to a lot of effort to make everything look nice in IE8 but phased out that work as I updated the site.
It’s also perfectly readable in browsers without CSS and Javascript, including Lynx. Dillo and Netsurf both have CSS implementations so broken, some versions of those browsers have rendering issues unless they disable CSS.
It is possible to make a website which renders in Lynx, which is perfectly readable in IE6, which can be read in a browser without CSS or Javascript.
If you're B2C you can probably ignore that and just not support it, but if you're B2B where you're selling not to users it's very hard to get away from supporting IE11.
If your users never directly interact with you (for example you sell white-label software which gets resold) then you just can't control your end-user tech stack enough.
If you're selling to partners who sell to companies who push out logins to their customers or user base then even if <1% of users use IE 11, that becomes 5% of companies having a user with it, which becomes 30% of the partners who are asking for IE11 support.
It's one thing to turn down 1% of users it's quite another to annoy 30% of your income stream.
As long as bootstrap 4 is supported (and the legacy bootstrap 3 support suggests it will be) then this doesn't have to be a problem of course, just one more thing to be aware of.