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.
