[HN Gopher] Vue 3 drops IE11 support plan
___________________________________________________________________
Vue 3 drops IE11 support plan
Author : simon04
Score : 334 points
Date : 2021-05-13 11:18 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Lapsa wrote:
| here we go again
| rasputnik6502 wrote:
| Vue is great but kind of forces you to build client side single
| page applications with global root vue component, i also don't
| like the way it assumes you're running nodejs. What about server
| side rendering and other web frameworks like aspnet or jsp - any
| good approaches?
| forgithubs wrote:
| Any chance we can keep supporting java applets ? Still need them
| to fill up my hours.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| - Not even supported by Microsoft apps like Teams
|
| - Easily less than 1% market share
|
| - IE11 is side by side packaged with some version of Edge in
| almost every case
|
| This seems reasonable.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Plus they're backporting features to v2 and making it the new
| lts
| jgalt212 wrote:
| What's the biggest thing that IE 11 is missing that gives devs
| the most grief?
| agloeregrets wrote:
| It's more like it is so weird compared to everything else. CSS
| Flex makes some strange choices, CSS Grid isn't, Some layout
| choices ignore W3C stuff, the JS engine is slower than
| everything by a huge amount, it's just crap compared to every
| other browser.
|
| Edit: Oh and if you have a large webapp, the F12 developer
| tools are just a crashfest and are unusable so you can't even
| debug what IE is doing weirdly.
| PeterBarrett wrote:
| We have found that refusing to support IE11 in healthcare
| environments has lost us 0 customers and given them a reason to
| move away from it. At this stage any company using it and the
| likes windows xp or windows 7 are just creating unnecessary
| security risks.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I think at this point it would be some US auto-body shop with
| IE6 hooked up to some internal software, or maybe one of those
| big Japanese companies that never changes anything at all.
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| I'm not even joking when I say this, for some companies, it would
| literally be cheaper to buy your IE users a new computer.
| Obviously, for enterprise customers, who are likely to be the
| majority of IE 11 users, you can't necessarily do that (though
| think about if you can).
| ipaddr wrote:
| It is not the computer that requires ie11 it awful software
| like remedy or legacy crystal reports or some professional
| healthcare vendor product.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| IE pre-Edge is best thought of as a built-in UI library that
| shipped with Windows, not a browser.
|
| When you add that + longevity in deeply integrated enterprise
| software, everything makes more sense.
| 7952 wrote:
| You could have some kind of wrapper that installs legacy
| web sites as a separate app and starts a locked down
| embedded IE with a set of security policies.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| derelictron
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| That's effectively what the Edge team built for legacy IE
| app support.
| thatsnotmepls wrote:
| But if that is the case, why simply not install a separate
| browser along with IE11?
| batrat wrote:
| Users are dumb thats why. We literally have to make 4-5
| shortcuts with iexpore.exe website.net and another one with
| chrome.exe website2.net and rename them accordingly. Some
| vendors have their web app work only with firefox and an
| old version like 20+ /:.
|
| Not to upset any dev but really trying to put some fancy
| stuff and a bunch of frameworks in a piece of software that
| does one thing and has to work 24/7 is really a bad ideea.
| mattmanser wrote:
| There's good reasons why these exist, and it's got zero
| to do with dev competence.
|
| In 2005 your employer asks for internal app, says you've
| got to use kendo or some such UI framework. Or maybe they
| want an autocomplete drop-down and you picked one that in
| the future will turn out to be not standards compliant.
| Or you were asked to use the stylesheet from another
| project to get them to look the same and that's not
| compliant. But you don't even know, as it only has to
| work on IE8 as that's all that's available to your users.
| You make it. It works fine.
|
| Fast forward to 2015, no-ones touched the app in 10
| years, the SVN server the code was on has been thrown
| away, and it's either rewrite the whole thing or force
| everyone to keep on using IE8.
|
| That's what generally happened, not dev incompetence.
| ipaddr wrote:
| From what I have seen supporting one browser is easier and
| maybe more sane for the IT department. I've seen chrome
| standard but certain employees get IE 7,8,9,10,11 and they
| use it for everything.
| newhotelowner wrote:
| Its not the computer. WE have a application that only runs on
| IE11. Our computers are windows 10. We use edge/chrome for
| everything else but 1 application still runs on IE11.
| coding123 wrote:
| No joke. If you think about the computers that would need
| replacement, say purchased in 2010, could literally be replaced
| with some microcomputer that fully wipes and resets itself
| between logins that runs some desktop linux. These things are
| capable of driving a screen, keyboard and mouse and can connect
| to the internet - we've boiled down what a computer is to a re-
| settable science at this point - there's no need for a big ass
| tower with fans in it anymore.
| kevincox wrote:
| I think you just described ChromeOS.
| some-guy wrote:
| It's not the computer that's the problem, it's the IT policy.
|
| Our Asian enterprise customers use IE11 by a staggering
| majority, _even with Edge installed on their machine_.
| jug wrote:
| Heh, so we really ought to move from MSHTML... We're embedding a
| web browser control in our app for flexibility in adapting the
| GIS documentation system to varying needs depending on customer.
| Some customers document more details on electricity meters than
| others, some tie them to other billing systems on the backend
| than others. Etc...
|
| But it's actually working out great and we can as a bonus update
| these parts of the desktop app without even shutting it down. Our
| app has a web API that the scripts interact with.
|
| The obvious downside is that it's using IE 11. WebView2 exists
| though which uses Microsoft's Chromium fork, but the control is
| only now reaching production quality. Like mere months ago.
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
|
| But it'll probably be what we eventually do especially as it
| supports Windows 7 which is quite something for emerging
| technology from Microsoft. We need this because surprisingly many
| customers still have Windows Server 2012 installs here and there.
| Sounds insane to run 10 year old servers for security reasons but
| the amazing thing is that Microsoft will support these to late
| 2023.
|
| For now we're in our most advanced scripts using Bootstrap Vue +
| VueJS 2 + a few polyfills and it's amazed me how seamless it
| actually is in developing on Chromium 90 and everything just
| keeps working and looking almost identical on IE 11. Interaction,
| model bindings, templating, everything. I totally did NOT expect
| this. I expected... "Support". I mean... This is some
| achievement. There's been the occasional, minor stumbling block
| every three months or so but still...
| adzm wrote:
| WebView2 is basically CEF for the most part though. I would
| love for Trident or EdgeHTML to be released as open source
| honestly. I'm sure there are complicated licensing issues that
| would prevent this though. I built and helped maintain a
| relatively complicated application that interacts via the COM
| interfaces of MSHTML (and the crazy print template stuff) which
| basically has to be scrapped eventually.
| justinlink wrote:
| 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| devwastaken wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is such an utter failing of the ecosystem.
|
| It's why I call out bullshit whenever I hear Android is
| Linux.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's more like Google Play Services/Linux these days.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| The way to get out of the cycle is to push back with
| great force. Unfortunately people are too easily swayed
| by propaganda.
| gruez wrote:
| don't androids use chrome by default, which can be updated
| through the play store?
| ccouzens wrote:
| 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....
|
| https://m.apkpure.com/firefox-browser-fast-private-safe-
| web-...
| skissane wrote:
| 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
| jlokier wrote:
| Mine is about 4 years old.
|
| It's still a great phone, runs everything I've run on it
| really well, and as far as I can tell it's working as
| well the day I bought it. Still receives firmware updates
| too.
|
| Its data connection is still faster than any other 4G
| device I've used, and faster than my home internet
| connection. The battery still lasts all day, and the
| ludicrously high resolution OLED screen is still in
| perfect condition.
|
| It's hard to see why I'd want to replace it before it
| breaks.
|
| If it lasts, I'll probably keep it a few more years, and
| because of the good experience, if it breaks I might get
| the same 4-year old model again second hand.
|
| Even if you gave me a new phone for free, I'd put it in a
| drawer because there's no obvious benefit and
| considerable hassle to moving over.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Mine is 7+. I'd love a phone for free but then I lose my
| unlimited calling and data as I would have to switch to a
| more expensive plan.
|
| Buying a phone outright costs more than a computer. $1200
| for the latest samsung. A two or three year old phone
| could cost $500.00.
|
| I do need a new phone as the buttons barely are able turn
| on the screen but I see no viable upgrade path.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Cintex Wireless is giving away free Kyocera Hydro phones
| to subsidized users in the US. It's so old it can't
| connect to any HTTPS website. :-(
| Izkata wrote:
| My previous phone was 8 years old by the time I upgraded,
| went straight from Android 2.1 to 7. My current one is 3
| years old and I don't see any reason to upgrade anytime
| soon.
| petschge wrote:
| 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.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| Phones sure, but dont forget tablets. There are loads of
| old outdated but still perfectly functional ones out
| there.
| Sayrus wrote:
| While I think this is mostly true for western countries,
| I don't think this applies to everywhere in the world.
|
| According to statcounter [1], Android 5.1 and 4.4 account
| for 8% of the devices in Africa while it accounts for 3%
| in Europe
|
| [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-
| share/mobi...
| zild3d wrote:
| think it depends on the manufacturer. Samsung ships with
| their own (chromium) browser
| luke2m wrote:
| It's usually a certificate issue: if you install Firefox
| things should mostly work.
| rk06 wrote:
| Edge is also available on android. I don't know if it
| supports older android versions though
| tanaypingalkar wrote:
| 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.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Not an issue for enterprise though, really.
| leipert wrote:
| 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
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Gitlab may not be the best example of potential pushback
| because the userbase is largely technologists. With this
| particular group, deprecating IE11 support is "preaching to
| the choir".
| leipert wrote:
| I think you are right on one hand, on the other hand I
| expected certain customers to have IE11 support as a
| requirement on paper.
| inopinatus wrote:
| The trick to minimising negative comment is ensuring your
| feedback form doesn't work in IE11 either.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Back in the day (2009ish), we dropped support for IE6 for all
| but a few sections of our website that were used by employees
| of financial institutions. Same story - chrome was just
| gaining popularity and it was an easy sell. We had this giant
| banner for IE6 users to download Firefox or Chrome. Saved us
| so much time in development and testing.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Oh, not for us. I think we dropped support in like 2012 our
| 13 ish and our clients lost their shit. So many of them
| would cite the fact that they had special activex plugins
| installed into IE which made them more "secure".
|
| Dropping 8 was a lot easier to do and we probably could
| ditch 11 today without a fuss. But man were our clients
| attached to 6, it was nuts.
| scottward wrote:
| See my song from 2009, "IE is Being Mean to Me Again":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTTzwJsHpU8
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Urg... Even in 2012 IE6 was ancient. If I was doing
| freelance and a client wanted IE6 support, I'm pretty
| sure I'd quadruple my rate and let them know it will take
| ten times as long to complete. Fuck IE6.
| gitowiec wrote:
| Yeah, that was bad browser for a developer who wanted to
| code only by standards. But in the other hand, back then
| when IE6 was released - it was the best.
| justinlink wrote:
| 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.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Heh, ya, same deal where I work. Dropped support I think
| two years ago now. Anyone who asks doesn't complain when
| they are told to use a different browser.
| godman_8 wrote:
| 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| 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.
| edoceo wrote:
| HTML5 date and time inputs still don't work on Safari
| tho.
| leesalminen wrote:
| Safari 14.1 for desktop looks to be getting closer. Same
| for 14.5 on mobile.
|
| https://caniuse.com/?search=Date
| babypuncher wrote:
| Apple should ditch WebKit and adopt Gecko. Mozilla could
| use the funding. and the two organizations share similar
| philosophies on user privacy. It would also deal a
| significant blow to the growing Blink monoculture.
| diegof79 wrote:
| According to the book "Creative Selection" (by one of the
| original Safari devs). They tried with Gecko first, but
| the POC didn't went far: the build system at that time
| was messy and they couldn't get it work. So they switched
| to KHTML, because of the nice code base. That internal
| fork evolved to WebKit.
| sonthonax wrote:
| Why should they? WebKit was developed by Apple, and is
| deeply integrated in the OS.
| archangel_one wrote:
| It was originally developed as part of KDE (KHTML),
| although Apple have obviously done a lot with it since.
| atatatat wrote:
| Apple probably has no interest in throwing good money
| after bad, with regards to security work involved in
| making that feasible.
| stephenr wrote:
| By that logic Firefox should drop gecko and adopt WebKit.
| It's already maintained by a megacorp and isn't blink.
| babypuncher wrote:
| WebKit is close enough to Blink that this move would be
| bad for the ecosystem as a whole. More variety in web
| technology implementations makes it harder for any one
| approach to dictate the standards going forwards.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Exactly, what a ridiculous statement from GP. Now it
| seems like the web might end up in webgl canvases anyways
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Probably after the WannaCry shitshow people stopped trying to
| hang on to legacy exploitable Operating Systems.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack
| acdha wrote:
| > 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.
| dathinab wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "Questionable" is an understatement. Anyone who requires or
| suggests IE for security reasons in 2021 is incompetent.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Anyone who requires or suggests IE for ANY reason in 2021 is
| incompetent.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| I could see a competent person suggesting it for use as a
| honeypot for attracting malware, but not for use as a
| browser.
| munchbunny wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| some-guy wrote:
| 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).
| butz wrote:
| Bootstrap 5 released last week also dropped IE11 and "legacy"
| Edge.
| ajaimk wrote:
| IE11 is the last IE; not sure if people realize that this
| actually means "We're dropping support for Internet Explorer" and
| not just a single version.
| onion2k wrote:
| What difference does that make in practice?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| That's literally what most folks have been waiting for for
| years, I'm pretty sure most web devs are keenly aware of this.
| However, do note that there is technically also still an IE7
| version floating around due to Windows Embedded Compact 2013
| not having reached EOL yet (its EOL date is 10/10/2023).
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I have no love for IE, but does anyone remember when we designed
| web pages to work on any browser?
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| Yup, and I don't want to go back to resorting to hacks to piles
| of hacks to support them all. It's good that most modern
| browsers just work for the most part these days.
|
| I am working on a few different apps right now and none of them
| are targeting IE. It's a huge time suck and just not worth
| doing at the expensive of improving other parts of the
| application.
| greggturkington wrote:
| Designed, or developed?
|
| I've been in front-end dev for about 15 years and I don't
| remember that. I remember developing web applications to work
| in browsers that led to a significant number of our business'
| conversions, and practicing progressive enhancement in general.
| atonse wrote:
| Yes, and we had to always use the lowest common denominator.
|
| Thankfully, with IE gone, the "lowest common denominator" is
| now pretty awesome.
|
| I just wish we had that with email rendering engines.
| kijin wrote:
| Yeah, somewhere in the late 2010s we seem to have lost interest
| in the idea of graceful degradation.
|
| It's one thing for a website to look a bit ugly and actions to
| require a few more clicks when accessed with an outdated
| browser. It's a completely different thing when you're left
| staring at a blank screen. The latter is what happens when an
| entire frontend framework decides that they'd rather give you
| no experience than a degraded experience because they don't
| want to maintain polyfills anymore.
|
| I do sympathize with the hate for IE, having suffered it for
| long enough. But once we've decided that IE users don't deserve
| anything, who's next? How about the hundreds of millions of
| third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How
| about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't
| afford to upgrade their screen reader? In the past, using a
| crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only
| people who use them are those who have no other choice.
|
| First they came for IE, and I did not speak out ... you know
| how the poem ends.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I think you have a valid point. However, I'd like to offer a
| factual correction on this part:
|
| > How about disabled people in middle-income countries who
| can't afford to upgrade their screen reader?
|
| As far as I know, this was only ever an issue on Windows, and
| it's not anymore. IMO, the best third-party screen reader for
| Windows is NVDA [1], and it's free and open-source. Even a
| user stuck on Windows XP or Vista can get a version of NVDA
| from 2017 that works well with Chromium (assuming one can get
| a Chromium-based browser that runs on those old versions of
| Windows). On all other platforms, the screen reader is built
| into the platform itself, and updated along with it. Windows
| itself has had Narrator built in for a long time now, and
| Narrator in Windows 10 is getting good (disclosure: I was on
| the Narrator team at Microsoft for 3 years), but there are
| still valid reasons to use a third-party screen reader on
| Windows.
|
| [1]: https://www.nvaccess.org/
| kijin wrote:
| You are right, but we must remember that poor people in
| poor regions are disproportionately more likely to be stuck
| on very old hardware. According to StatCounter, 5.7% of PC
| users in Africa are still on XP or Vista, compared to only
| 0.6% in North America. That's almost 10 times as much.
|
| Rallying against older browsers was once supposed to be a
| good fight against evil monopolists. Now it's about kicking
| away the ladder from people who are already the poorest and
| most powerless in the world, making them even less able to
| take advantage of the latest information and communication
| tools. And we're not even realizing what we're doing
| because we're so used to the first world fast upgrade
| cycle.
| Slackwise wrote:
| > How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users
| with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled
| people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade
| their screen reader?
|
| None of these are Internet Explorer, the problem in question.
| Chrome and its Play Store dependencies are backwards
| compatible to much older phones. Android browsers even years
| ago had better web platform support than IE11.
|
| I fully sympathize and believe that web _sites_ should be as
| compatible as possible. It 's the web _apps_ that fall apart
| once you take away modern functionality.
|
| > In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice.
| Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no
| other choice.
|
| This really depends on how much their actual lives depend on
| being able to use the web. If they live in poverty and/or
| third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the
| web? What part of their life depends on what site exactly?
| Sure, communication is relevant, but we're already saying
| they have smart phones and thus data connections, email, and
| whatever native chat apps.
|
| I'm not saying we should leave them behind technologically or
| that they don't matter or shouldn't have access to more
| information or knowledge, I'm just simply being practical
| with what is likely the real impact to their life.
|
| In the end, I think web developers need to stop using
| ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes
| static text content. The web already excels at that. Servers
| cache. Browsers cache. We don't need Vue to render a blog or
| article. Please leave such tech for SPAs and "apps" rather
| than _sites_ or pages.
| pornel wrote:
| I remember when we wrote pages for web standards, and then
| wasted hours hacking them to behave in IE that didn't support
| the standards.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Now people write for chrome, and then spend hours hacking
| them to support web standards.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| More like Chrome is the Web Standard now. Generally stuff
| that runs in chrome, runs fine in Firefox and Edge, Safari
| can be a little weird sometimes but overall it's way easier
| these days.
| pornel wrote:
| There are some fine differences. Google likes to blur the
| line between actual Web standards (which have consensus
| via W3C or WHATWG), Chrome's prototypes that may inform
| future standards, and self-serving Google APIs that only
| have "Web" in their name.
|
| Sometimes it's just Google releasing whatever they want,
| use it on google.com and youtube.com while serving
| slower/buggier fallbacks to others, so other vendors have
| no choice but to implement Google's non-standard
| invention to avoid looking broken.
|
| Google gets away with this a lot, because there are also
| many actual standards that Safari is ignoring. Without
| following dozens of mailing lists and bug trackers it's
| hard to tell what Google is pushing for themselves (e.g.
| AMP was a motivation for many "standards" proposals), and
| where others are dragging their feet.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| > Google gets away with this a lot
|
| I think the point seen here is really that if the
| standards org doesn't impact the browsers and the browser
| in question has greater than 60% market share then that
| browser is the standards org and the W3C doesn't matter.
| Who is going to harm Google? How would the W3C enforce
| their standards? If most of your users are on Chrome and
| Chrome sets the feature set rather than the W3C, why
| wouldn't you just build to Chrome?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The W3C gave up on many web standards like HTML and their
| process is just rubber stamping whatever WHATWG decides
| are standards and WHATWG seems to just rubber stamp
| whatever Google wants (more often than not).
| pornel wrote:
| Browser vendors have always been driving the standards.
| W3C is correct to call their docs "recommendations".
|
| There was a brief nice moment in history when WebKit,
| Gecko, Trident, and Presto each had enough market share
| that all the vendors _had to_ cooperate.
|
| Nowadays Trident and Presto are dead. Gecko is a great
| engine, but doesn't have enough market share to veto
| anything. So Blink can ship anything and claim it's
| supported "everywhere except Safari".
| bwat49 wrote:
| I think websites should be designed to work in all modern
| browsers, but IE is a deprecated/dead browser that takes extra
| work to support.
|
| Dropping support for IE is the right thing to do at this point.
| dspillett wrote:
| That was when we had no choice but to force in hacks to make
| things work on browsers that didn't quite follow the same
| standards. You ended up only being able to use the lowest
| common denominator feature set or using many hacks & polyfills.
|
| Better is to stick with standards and make the browser makers
| implement them properly. Of course things aren't perfect still
| (Safari has a reputation for being slow on the uptake so you
| can't use the latest & greatest if you need to support those
| users, and it is best to avoid the bleeding edge anyway (at
| least sticking as far back as the oldest LTS release of common
| browsers)).
| cout wrote:
| I started using the web in 1994, and no, I don't ever remember
| a time when people designed web pages to work on any browser.
|
| In the mid-90s, the internet was filled with pages that had
| "best viewed with Netscape Navigator" or "best viewed with
| Internet Explorer" icons. Twenty-five years later that
| mentality hasn't changed, and I don't think it ever will. It
| costs too much to target more than one or two browsers.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I feel it is less of a struggle now.
|
| I remember having to support IE 6 through 9, Safari, Chrome,
| Firefox and Opera.
|
| I think at least 25% of the team's time was spent on getting IE
| 6 to behave acceptably.
|
| No built-in browser debugger or 'developer tools' for some of
| those.
|
| I will say, though, there were only a few screen resolutions to
| consider.
|
| ...and lots of <table>s.
| akie wrote:
| I remember doubling estimated development time if the site
| needed to support IE5.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| There was never a time when that was the case.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| The problem is that IE chains your feet compared to every other
| single browser. CSS Vars? Nope! JS performance that is 1/50th
| that of Chrome on the same platform? Yep! Weird-ass rendering
| choices that make zero sense compared to the W3C standards? MS
| has you!
|
| Basically, IE11 didn't change with the web so it's really out
| there now. You can develop for Firefox and all the Webkit/Blink
| offshoots just fine, but IE holds you up.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Yes. And it sucked. Lots of extra code and testing.
| bnt wrote:
| So what's the alternative? Code in Chrome and yolo?
| greggturkington wrote:
| The alternative is having a sane process for determining
| what browsers you support, an a rock-solid QA and release
| process.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| They support Edge, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
|
| That's 87.86% of what users are using (per Wikimedia's
| stats). To support the 1.76% of IE users, it will require a
| disproportionate amount of work that could negatively
| impact other development that benefits many more people.
|
| That's the reality: Development time is a zero-sum game. If
| you do this you aren't doing this other thing, and in this
| case we're talking about under 2% that likely should be
| discouraged from using it.
|
| PS - And this coming from someone whose uses are primarily
| on IE11 still (see my other post in the thread). Just
| because I personally benefit from IE11 staying around a few
| more years, doesn't mean the entire web should bend to
| that. IE11 must die, we just cannot turn on a needle, and
| when Edge dropped support for Java Applets/Flash it forced
| tons of organizations into IE11 for many more years than
| they would have wanted.
| dspillett wrote:
| Code to standards and expect the browsers to implement
| those standards reasonably.
|
| Avoid the bleeding edge to support those held back at LTS
| versions of common browsers, or if you use new tricks make
| sure they don't make things unusable on older-but-LTS
| browsers. Whether you consider IE11 an LTS browser or not
| is a matter for you to decide (yes, as it will be getting
| security updates for some time still, or no as it is seven
| years old, not getting any feature/support updates, and
| support for it is deprecated by even its own manufacture's
| apps).
|
| Support accessibility by not using fancy things for the
| sake of it, and if you do something fancy make at least a
| little effort to have things degrade gracefully for those
| with accessibility issues. A lot of sites/apps skip this
| step, but shouldn't.
| cutler wrote:
| So charge extra for IE support.
| seumars wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. This is way less of a problem as it was
| even 5 years ago. Even a modern tool like Babel, which was
| pretty much mandatory in webdev build is becoming less
| important given the pace at which browsers standardise specs
| nowadays.
| aranchelk wrote:
| The operative word here is "pages". Developers of statics sites
| should try to support everything. For full-featured web apps on
| a budget, the challenges of cross compatibility can be
| insurmountable.
| pansa2 wrote:
| I'm currently building a website that uses Vue 3 in parts, as
| well as other features that don't work (well) in IE11 such as CSS
| Grid.
|
| Would you recommend only displaying an error screen for any users
| who try to view the site using Internet Explorer or another old
| browser? Or should I let those browsers try to display what they
| can, and maybe also a warning message?
| seumars wrote:
| As a general rule you shouldn't bother with IE11 at all unless
| the project explicitly requires it.
| pansa2 wrote:
| Do you mean I should just ignore it? Not even display a
| warning message?
| babypuncher wrote:
| My B2B app is completely broken in IE. I just let it stay that
| way. No warnings. Tech support knows to tell customers to use
| Firefox, Chrome, or Safari if they run into issues. It's such a
| rare occurrence that it is not worth the effort to detect an
| ancient browser and render a warning.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| My two cents is it depends on the nature of the lack of
| functionality, is this just about not displaying information or
| is this going to cause data corruption (ie, if validation
| checks or expected ajax calls are not being made), if it's just
| the display of things I would probably go with a warning
| message.
| pansa2 wrote:
| > _if it 's just the display of things I would probably go
| with a warning message_
|
| Thanks, that's what I was thinking. Is there a standard way
| to detect whether to show the warning message based on which
| browser is being used?
| seumars wrote:
| There are lot of snippets out there, the most common way
| would be to target the window.navigator.userAgent,
| something like: function isIE() {
| return /Trident\/|MSIE/.test(window.navigator.userAgent);
| }
| unilynx wrote:
| Keep in mind that the code has to compile for checks to
| work. Eg a 'let' in the same script block will break the
| isIE check too and it's easy to miss that someone broke
| it. How often does the ie11 code get tested on ie11..
|
| Best to keep the IE 11 warning code in a separate
| (nomodule?) script file
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Redirect them to https://browser-
| update.org/update.html?force_outdated=true
| coding123 wrote:
| IE11 is supposedly at 1% market share. However, Vue market share
| is 0.77% of all websites (which is actually huge) Therefore, even
| for those 1% users of IE11, that's still like 1 of the hundred
| pages they'll visit in a day. And because so many other
| frameworks already killed IE11, it's not like those 1% users are
| going to complain too much more than they would already be, oh
| shit now 2 of the 100 pages I visit per day are blank!
| dzonga wrote:
| it will be helpful if you provide links to the stats you
| pointed out.
| ______- wrote:
| I use IE6 as a sort of litmus test for websites. If a site works
| in IE6, it's more likely to work on every browser imaginable.
| Those people creating sites designed to work in the latest
| browser version only scare me to death.
| onion2k wrote:
| If a website still works in IE6 then there are some _serious_
| problems with the site 's security implementation. IE6 doesn't
| support TLS 1.2 or 1.3, it's vulnerable to POODLE, RC4 and
| FREAK attacks, and there's no ECC compatibility on any OS.
|
| If a site loads in IE6 stay the hell away from it.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| As long as there is no protocol downgrade attack, server
| support for TLS 1.1 in addition to 1.2 won't affect people
| using modern browsers.
| ______- wrote:
| I would have my site on a local staging server that uses HTTP
| before I push it to production where HTTPS/TLS would be
| turned on.
| labster wrote:
| Flexbox and block-scoped variables aren't really that scary.
| Honestly less scary than the alternatives, nested tables and
| global variables. Sometimes it's okay to have nice things.
| w-j-w wrote:
| The landscape has changed. Most typical, everyday user have
| browsers that update themselves to the latest version.
| Supporting ancient technology (like IE6) doesn't provide a
| benefit that really justifies the enormous amount of work
| required. Just let the old browsers die already.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| If you mean that IE6 represents some common set of baseline
| features that all other browsers will support this is
| absolutely 100% false.
|
| IE6 has tons of quirks and nonstandard features, and sites that
| are truly written specifically for IE6 and target its features
| (e.g. activex) and numerous css bugs will simply not work or
| display correctly in any other browsers at all.
|
| Newer versions of IE have to have two separate rendering modes.
| One of these, "quirks mode," is a non-standard mode that
| specifically emulates the broken IE6 functionality, because
| this is the only way to correctly display pages designed for
| IE6 in a modern browser.
|
| On the other hand, people writing new sites in 2021 that
| support IE are people who are very concerned with compatibility
| who are being very careful and using zillions of LOC of
| pollyfills to ensure the sites work in IE. The sites these
| people create will work in other browsers not because of any
| property of IE6, but because the people making them also put a
| lot of work into ensuring they are compatible with other
| browsers, and dropping support for IE would save a lot of work
| without reducing compatibility with other browsers.
| greggturkington wrote:
| Is anyone working on enterprise-level apps that see a significant
| number of conversions from IE11 right now?
|
| I'm surprised to learn a framework the size of Vue was still
| supporting it until now.
| wubin wrote:
| SAP, one of the largest ERP vendors, is dropping IE support
| this year for most of their products including legacy ones.[0]
| And according to SAP, "91% of Forbes Global 2000" are SAP
| customers.[1] So we can expect enterprises moving to "modern
| browsers" this year if not done already.
|
| I do create B2B apps. Last time I had to support IE11 was 6
| years ago.
|
| [0]: https://blogs.sap.com/2021/02/02/internet-
| explorer-11-will-n... [1]: https://www.sap.com/why-sap.html
| egonschiele wrote:
| I've heard that the people who use IE11 are the ones who don't
| have a choice, because maybe they are using a computer at a
| library, or some kind of accessibility-related device. Does
| anyone on HN know of solid data to back this claim? This
| screenreader[1] survey for example says 11% of their users use
| IE11, though that is from 2019.
|
| [1] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#browsers
| Someone1234 wrote:
| We're writing apps for mostly local government users, almost
| all of who use IE11 because it continues to have Java Applet
| support.
|
| Some of these Applet-based things have been migrated to modern
| web, but many still haven't, since it is almost 15+ years of
| software development now needing to be re-written.
|
| There have been discussions about Edge's "IE Mode" but
| unfortunately that only applies to domain joined machines, and
| they have a BYOD policy.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| Can you not have the employees join the domain, like how some
| companies let you enroll in Exchange on a personal phone in
| exchange for allowing device administration/remote wipe?
|
| As with a phone, if it bothers the employees (it'd certainly
| bother me) have them buy a laptop for work only.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I think you mean, have the employer buy that laptop/phone
| for them. The employer provides an, imo, unreasonable ask,
| then they should have to provide the alternative.
| some-guy wrote:
| Depends on where they live, but our Asian enterprise customers
| are >70% on IE11, even with Edge installed on most of their
| machines.
|
| In the US the number has dropped significantly over the past
| five years (it was >50% but is now under 25%).
| tzs wrote:
| I do some server work for a small company that sells a
| downloadable product whose target audience is ordinary people,
| probably not too technologically sophisticated when it comes to
| computers.
|
| It is unlikely someone would purchase from anywhere than their
| home Windows PC, and I don't think many are using
| accessibility-related devices (the site was using a third party
| component that turned out to be terrible for accessibility, and
| it was years before anyone complained about it (and we then
| replaced it with one that was accessible)).
|
| I just took a look at the logs for the past 12 months. Here are
| the relative numbers of successful orders by browser,
| normalized to Firefox on Windows 10 = 100.
|
| On Windows 10: Chrome 602, IE11 116, Firefox 100, Edge 94.
|
| On Windows 8: Chrome 44, Firefox 16, IE11 14, IE10 4.
|
| On Windows 7: Chrome 76, Firefox 40, IE11 30, IE9 2.
|
| On Vista: Chrome 8, Firefox 4.
|
| On XP: Chrome 6, Firefox 2.
| frereubu wrote:
| We build websites for organisations in the UK who do a lot of
| work with the NHS, and we regularly still see ~10% visits from
| IE11 in Google Analytics. Organisations that don't work with
| the NHS consistently show < 2%, so although I don't have
| conclusive proof I'm pretty sure that's what's going on for us.
| jffry wrote:
| I wonder how much of a sampling bias there is. It's plausible
| to me that users of non-IE11 browsers are more likely to be
| using ad/tracking blockers which block Google Analytics. That
| could skew the relative population of "users who ran Google
| Analytics" towards more IE11 users.
|
| Were you able to use other sources than Google Analytics to
| look at the browser population? I imagine working with the
| NHS that things like HTTP access logs are harder to wrangle
| (if they exist at all)
| frereubu wrote:
| For clarity, we don't build websites for NHS bodies, we
| build sites for some external organisations that work with
| the NHS, so logs would be relatively easy if it felt worth
| it. GA is my only source, but my hunch is that use of
| blockers is pretty consistent across clients whose visitors
| are mostly from businesses or institutions, and I see this
| differential across those audiences. Having spoken to
| people who work in the NHS Digital team there are
| definitely pockets of IE use, although it's been getting
| better - the shift sped up quite a bit after the Wannacry
| attack.
| desas wrote:
| I work on an NHS focused web app, if it's pockets they're
| pretty deep ones.
| nicoburns wrote:
| We have basic first party analytics of the NHS users of our
| software (mainly just browser versions actually), and it's
| probably a little over half of them are using IE11 still.
| My impression from talking to some of them is that most of
| them now have both Chrome and IE11 available on their
| machines, and it's just which one they're using. I'm sure
| that's uniform everywhere though.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Biggest reason is corporate/government IT that's been slow to
| upgrade, possibly because they have intranet sites that don't
| support newer browsers. Accessibility is available (and better)
| in modern browsers.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Bingo, just commented, this is exactly what happens.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Basically. I work in the B2B online education space and many
| large businesses use IE11 on hardware that supports other
| browsers just fine. Part of it is that they use decades-old
| intranets that only support IE officially so they were stuck.
| We noticed since around early pre-pandemic 2020 (and
| accelerated by the pandemic), that IE users are becoming Chrome
| and Chromium Edge users. Our pet theory is that the Microsoft
| EoL pushed IT departments to just make the jump and then WFH
| pushed many to new hardware where they might have a choice.
| Also our product is far worse in IE as Trident's JS Engine
| truly is horrific and our whole site is much faster in Chrome.
| We saw IE use drop to under 10% now from ~35% around two and a
| half years ago.
| tgv wrote:
| I'm counting 0.9% under our users (which is of course a biased
| group, but at least near being representative for region,
| gender, age and education) since 2020-01-01, but only 0.2%
| since 2021-01-01. So it seems be dropping quite steadily.
|
| Edit: a few of the IE11 user agent strings even mention Windows
| NT 6.1, and no x64 or WOW/Win64, so I guess they're still
| running 32 bit Windows 7.
| elisaado wrote:
| There is medical software here in the Netherlands, that, to
| this day, still recommends using IE11 for the best experience.
| reaperducer wrote:
| IE11 is over 10% on the sites I build. Even when IE11 becomes
| only .5% of my users, I will support it.
|
| I work in healthcare, so I don't get to make lazydev excuses
| about time constraints and "edge cases." The people still using
| IE are the people who need my web sites the most.
| incrudible wrote:
| > I work in healthcare, so I don't get to make lazydev
| excuses about time constraints and "edge cases."
|
| If I were to read this statement uncharitably, I would
| conclude that there is plenty of money in healthcare to be
| wasted on supporting outdated technology, adding to the
| already outrageous costs of healthcare. Furthermore, if
| you're not lazy, you're probably creating unnecessary work.
|
| > The people still using IE are the people who need my web
| sites the most.
|
| From a holistic welfare perspective, giving these people a
| modern web browser would be better than maintaining their
| status quo.
| pc86 wrote:
| I work in healthcare as well and the health IT landscape is
| horrifying. Hospitals not hiring software engineers is part
| of the reason you end up with thirty-person implementation
| teams from firms like Epic and GE trying to config their way
| out integration hell. Trying to integrate a new product via
| HL7 is a special hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies.
| It's the only standard I've worked with where nobody even
| attempts to follow the spec, and everyone else is just
| expected to conform to whatever arbitrary changes the
| hospital made (both intentionally, and accidentally). The
| vast majority of IT management is completely non-technical,
| especially - paradoxically - at larger institutions. At small
| community places the IT director is typically the person who
| was setting up the doctors' computers ten years prior. At
| huge practices it's someone with an MHA or who hasn't done
| anything remotely technical since the 90's.
|
| I love working in healthcare but the hospital side is
| atrocious in my experience.
| BunsanSpace wrote:
| My companies thin client has to support IE11 because we run on
| lots of lock down industrial control systems that run Windows 7
| or Windows 10 IoT and cannot have any other browser installed.
|
| So this reflects my experience as well.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I know there is a CURRENT Microsoft product (for
| administration) that requires IE11. I do not remember what it
| is but I was really surprised when our Microsoft guru (he is
| really good) showed it to me and was not happy either.
|
| I will try to get the name tomorrow.
| guntars wrote:
| Look, something I'm finally qualified to answer! At my previous
| job our customers were a representative sample of the Fortune
| 500 and about 40% of our users (their employees) were on IE11
| just a few months ago. There were some very well known
| companies that used IE11 exclusively. It's very quickly
| changing and this might be the year when it finally goes away,
| but it's still alive and well in the corporate world.
| koboll wrote:
| >It's very quickly changing and this might be the year when
| it finally goes away
|
| Microsoft is offering IE11 extended support until at least
| 2025, so I wouldn't bet on that.
| jtdev wrote:
| Great... thanks Microsoft...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| IE11: yes. IE11 "integrated into anything you were using
| IE11 for": no. MS is working hard to make sure that it
| fulfills its contractual obligation with respect to IE11's
| EOL, but it's at the same time removing it from everywhere
| it was traditionally integrated so that it can die a proper
| death. It'll be officially supported for as long as Windows
| 10 is a thing, but they're going to make it as useless as
| possible outside of "just being an old browser that's
| incompatible with today's web".
| Rapzid wrote:
| Yeah, it's been made clear for some time that MS
| considers IE11 a compatibility platform and don't
| recommend it as a "browser".
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Is the new Edge changing that?
| yashap wrote:
| Huh, my last company was very successful in the enterprise
| space, selling to tonnes of Fortune 500 companies and
| government organizations, and IE11 was <2% of users for us.
| We were preparing to deprecate support for it around the time
| I left.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| FWIW, some parts of US HHS are just rolling out Chrome
| support, and there's still not full coverage of all
| functionality.
|
| Granted, this is the same codebase that has an element on
| their login page named "acceptCredintials", so... that's the
| starting point.
| furstenheim wrote:
| We got a huge company using IE11, they could not update to
| Chrome because "it was not secure" according to their IT
| department
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That's odd. Both Chrome and Firefox have strong
| "enterprise" controls now, well integrated with
| Windows/Active Directory/etc.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The biggest issue with newer browsers is actually
| probably the feature cycle. Every couple months browsers
| introduce at least one horrible feature I need to update
| our policies to disable.
| ben509 wrote:
| They probably had to rotate their password three times
| while writing that memo.
| donio wrote:
| Technically that's true since none of the browsers are. But
| not a very good justification obviously.
| userbinator wrote:
| It's a great justification if you see just how much
| Google's spyware browser phones home...
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I mean, considering the surface area of a browser....
| they seem pretty damn solid to me. Am I missing
| something?
| kevincox wrote:
| Yes, considering the surface area they are relatively
| secure. But the surface area is absolutely massive and I
| have no doubt in my mind that there are multiple full
| remote code execution zero-days in all major browsers.
|
| Treating security as an absolute is rarely useful because
| very few things are completely secure. No browser will be
| completely secure for the foreseeable future.
| ok_coo wrote:
| I promise that this isn't a snarky question.
|
| Why has it taken so long for corp America to move off of IE?
| There are so many other better alternatives.
|
| I still sometimes have flashbacks of having to design around
| and support IE6. /shudder
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| I think it is two reasons
|
| 1) Sometimes companies go out of business or stop
| supporting\updating things. If you build critical processes
| around these outdated tools, it can be very difficult to
| change.
|
| 2) Users aren't savvy enough to know when to use Chrome,
| Firefox or IE. Some aren't even savvy enough to call things
| the correct names (looking at you Mozzarella Foxfire). So
| they just settle on on a lowest common denominator.
| akamia wrote:
| I used to work in IT at a Fortune 100 manufacturing
| company. IE versions hung around for a long time because
| there was a lot of software that was built with only IE in
| mind and only received the bare minimum of support.
|
| In some cases this was off the shelf software from vendors
| who had gone out of business. In other cases it was
| software built in house that would require a complete
| rewrite to modernize.
|
| All of this software was tightly integrated into processes
| that were critical for the company to operate. While the
| cost of replacing the old software was a consideration, the
| biggest concern was the potential disruption to operations.
|
| If a software change reduced productivity or even worse
| caused work to stop entirely, it meant millions in
| financial impact.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I still have IE installed so that I can run ONE god-
| forsaken enterprise application known as Oracle EBS
| (Enterprise Business Suite). For everything else I use
| Chrome.
|
| Oracle EBS uses NPAPI (AKA Java Plugins AKA Java Applets).
| Chrome dropped support for NPAPI years ago, and since then
| we've been using IE to whenever we need to use Oracle EBS.
|
| I understand that the latest version of Oracle EBS might
| now support the cutting-edge technology of Java Web Start
| to continue to deliver their 1990's era grey-blah UI's with
| shitty layout. I don't even care to ask about upgrades.
|
| Negotiating with the bean-counter types that have enabled
| Oracle to put it's slimy tentacles into every critical area
| of the business is a dreadful, thankless task. I expect it
| will keep running, at its current version, long after I
| leave or retire. At some point, I expect employees will
| need to spin up VM's to open IE to use the f-ing thing--
| perhaps they can set it up in their "forever" dream OS,
| Windows NT with IE4?
| elygre wrote:
| It sounds like you (or your enterprise) has chosen not to
| upgrade you applications. That's fine. But it's hardly
| fair to blame the vendor for your choice of not
| upgrading.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's actually probably the best approach: make some
| Citrix hosts running IE11 and let people use those when
| they actually need to touch the legacy software. Then you
| can upgrade everything else.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Easy reason: why spend money (and reduce quarterly profit)
| if the software is still supported by the vendor for
| another two years? Let it be the problem of the CTO of two
| years from now.
|
| In two years the C-level/VP responsible has long since
| taken the golden parachute and his successor is stuck with
| the bill.
|
| Also, any sort of internal IT stuff is exclusively seen as
| a cost center by the MBA bean counters. Stuff like
| employees leaving due to outdated IT isn't something
| quantifiable in impact unless you have entire departments
| walking away at once.
| vijaybritto wrote:
| I think if they are shown that moving off IE is gonna
| increase the profits then they'll do it in a week
| vips7L wrote:
| 50% of our users (all big corporations) are still on IE too.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| All Windows screen readers with any significant user base have
| supported Chromium and Firefox for a while now. The old
| EdgeHTML engine didn't work so well with third-party Windows
| screen readers, so some blind users may have held onto IE 11
| because of that. But any Windows screen reader that works with
| Chrome also works with the Chromium-based Edge. And note that
| the WebAIM survey you released was from before the Chromium-
| based Edge started being pushed to the broader Windows user
| base.
|
| Bottom line: Web developers should not feel obligated to keep
| supporting IE 11 for the sake of screen reader users.
| jayflux wrote:
| People using IE 11 "because they have to" is a hard thing to
| quantify without some sort of survey.
|
| I say this because even though your anecdote rings true, I've
| seen many people in offices use IE 11 purely out of ignorance
| and comfort reasons rather than because they were forced. They
| had Edge, Firefox installed but stuck with IE because no one
| told them to stop using it.
|
| We may be underestimating the portion of "if it ain't broke why
| fix it" crowd are using IE 11 but it's hard to say with
| statistical data alone.
|
| Anyway, regardless of how it's sliced, it's low enough now for
| libraries to start dropping.
| jjice wrote:
| Legitimate question: what companies (I'm assuming it's
| government) done have Chrome or Firefox installed? What is this
| IE compatibility caused by?
| [deleted]
| ta988 wrote:
| Talking about vue, I'm really waiting for Vuetify to support
| Vue3. Especially with typescript I feel like the current ways to
| describe fragments are a bit half-assed.
| gregors wrote:
| Microsoft Teams already chopped it, with Office 365 not far
| behind.
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/mi....
| dmix wrote:
| That's a pretty big signal to other developers about doing the
| same and might be the catalyst for Vue choosing to do so...
| mkl95 wrote:
| I hope this is the last time I read Vue and IE11 in the same
| sentence. Actually, I hope this is the last time I read IE11 in
| any sentence.
| shmiga wrote:
| what is IE11?
| cutler wrote:
| A browser - Microsoft Internet Explorer version 11.
| userbinator wrote:
| IE11 is basically the last browser that has a sane non-
| infantilising UI and per-site configuration by default. It works
| great for the non-JS sites, better than Dillo and Netsurf at
| least.
|
| I use it as a way to say "Fuck the Google monopoly." Firefox is
| slowly going down that path too, because they haven't a chance at
| opposing the giant.
| dvdkon wrote:
| I think you might be better served by something like
| qutebrowser. Besides, IE will fail on quite a few non-JS
| websites. For example, pretty much all my websites use CSS
| grid.
| throwie wrote:
| I still use IE as my default browser (and Firefox as a fallback),
| for the following reasons:
|
| - The font rendering works better for my eyesight.
|
| - Killer feature: Ctrl+N/K clones the browser window/tab
| _including_ the history. I.e. you can effectively fork the
| history. EDIT: And, equally important, opening a link in a new
| tab /window also preserves (clones) the history.
|
| - Certain keyboard operations have better usability than on other
| browsers.
|
| - The title bar + address/tab bar height height is smallest among
| all browsers (after some configuration).
|
| I'm slowly getting used to the inevitability of migrating to
| Firefox. The font rendering and especially the clone-by-keyboard
| feature are the hardest part though. (And the fact that Firefox
| doesn't allow yellow as a search highlight color.)
| test6554 wrote:
| If you middle-click the refresh button in chrome it clones the
| current tab with history. You can also middle click the back
| button to clone the previous page in a new tab with history
| preserved.
| throwie wrote:
| Thanks. The main problem is that there doesn't seem to be a
| way to access it by keyboard. Secondly, it's also not
| possible to convert a tab to a separate window by keyboard.
| So what is a single keypress on IE becomes a cumbersome
| operation.
| butz wrote:
| Some UI features on Firefox can be customized using
| userChrome.css [1]. I bet you can make title bar as small as
| you like and change search highlight color. For font rendering
| you could create a bug report.
|
| [1] https://www.userchrome.org/
| throwie wrote:
| Regarding the search highlight color, Firefox has the
| (mis)feature that if the highlight background color is too
| close to the text background color (which is the case for
| yellow vs. white background), then it inverts the search
| highlight text and background color, i.e. you get yellow text
| on black background for the highlight, instead of black text
| on yellow background. The rationale is accessiblity, i.e.
| requiring a minimum contrast for the highlight background
| against the normal background. But for me that behavior is
| anti-accessibility, and it can't be turned off. The issue has
| been raised since the behavior was introduced in 2009, but
| the maintainers don't want to change it. The corlor inversion
| implementation also seems to be pretty deep in the stack, and
| tied to the HTML <mark> tag.
|
| Regarding font rendering, there have been multiple issue
| reports over the years, although most users complain that
| Firefox doesn't render text like Chrome, which I tend to find
| even worse than Firefox. ;)
| jazu wrote:
| There exist several options in about config that let you change
| some font rendering settings. Have you tried fiddling with
| them?
| greatquux wrote:
| Have you looked into https://www.mactype.net/ to see if it
| would help with any of your font rendering issues?
| throwie wrote:
| Is there a page somewhere that explains what it does? I'm not
| a particular fan of macOS font rendering though.
| [deleted]
| greatquux wrote:
| Then actually it might not help you too much... it's really
| a replacement font rendering engine for Windows (initially
| Windows GDI rendering and now they're adding in support for
| DirectWrite). It uses FreeType with various parameters to
| make the font rendering look more like macOS (in a
| nutshell: macOS doesn't use aggressive hinting to force the
| font shapes into the pixel grid, which makes it blurrier
| but more accurate on low-resolution screens; Windows does,
| and so it looks sharper on low-resolution screens).
|
| However while looking around at a bug report to get MacType
| to work in Firefox [0] I came across a setting in Firefox's
| about:config [1] that can change the font rendering and
| that might help you out. Not sure about the history forking
| thing but there may be some Firefox extension to help with
| that.
|
| [0] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/673 [1]
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652141
| throwie wrote:
| Thanks. Yes, I tried all possible parameters for font
| rendering in Firefox. For some reason none of them match
| the sharpness of the IE rendering.
| amlib wrote:
| Have you considered using a 4K screen with 200% scaling?
| That would considerably sharpen text in any situation
| compared to a 1080p screen.
| [deleted]
| throwie wrote:
| Yes, but (a) there's too much software I still use that
| isn't hi-DPI capable, and (b) I use a 1920x1200 display
| so would lose 10% vertical height, which is quite
| significant.
|
| It's all a question of trade-offs of course
| skrebbel wrote:
| Fwiw Firefox's "duplicate tab" feature similarly clones
| history. It only exists for tabs though, not entire windows.
| Right-click the tab, it's in the context menu.
| throwie wrote:
| To be fair, on IE it doesn't clone the entire window, just
| the current tab into a new window. Still, that's my main use
| case, and AFAICT it's not possible in Firefox by keyboard or
| even with a single mouse action.
| scratcheee wrote:
| There's multiple extensions that claim to provide a
| shortcut to the duplicate tab option, fwiw
| throwie wrote:
| Thanks. Now that I looked into it again, the issue I have
| is not just the Duplicate Tab feature, but that opening a
| link in a new tab or window clears the history of that
| new tab/window instead of cloning the history of the
| source tab. that means that you can't quickly open a
| couple of links into new tabs/windows, with each of them
| preserving the current history. I don't think there's a
| fix for that.
| netmare wrote:
| There's a mouse shortcut for Duplicate Tab in Firefox:
| middle-click the Reload button! It blew my mind when I read
| about it in some random thread a couple of years ago.
| petepete wrote:
| I've been using it since more or less the start and
| didn't know that. Thanks!
| OriginalNebula wrote:
| If you mouse3 on the refresh button in Firefox you get a tab
| clone with history.
| marban wrote:
| Even though I've more or less zero IE11 users on Upstract, I
| still make sure that everything renders and basically works on it
| -- I think this defensive, vanilla, bare-metal, no-gimmicks
| mindset creates better and simpler products -- in spirit of what
| old-school Web tech was about.
|
| (Unless you're building something like Figma of course).
| babypuncher wrote:
| Modern Javascript and CSS both have features that allow for
| much cleaner and more readable code. Supporting IE11 seems like
| a really janky way to enforce code standards.
| paxys wrote:
| If you think IE11 supports "vanilla, bare-metal" JavaScript or
| CSS you are going to have a bad time. In fact, if you are
| building a very simple website most of your code complexity
| will come from having to support legacy browsers and working
| around their quirks.
| swyx wrote:
| I've been keeping a log of the slow death of IE here:
| https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1260627626739130369?s=20
|
| in the past year, major sites in all categories from linkedin to
| twitter to skillshare to microsoft to adobe have all dropped IE,
| with Wordpress, Drupal and Vuejs making plans.
|
| The big catalyst I think will be the US government dropping IE
| support - it only supports browsers above 2% usage
| (https://github.com/uswds/uswds/issues/3877), and we are
| currently hovering at 2% dropping 0.1% a month
| https://analytics.usa.gov/
| dmm wrote:
| Firefox isn't far behind at 2.6%
| afavour wrote:
| Depressing. But on the other hand you don't actually have to
| do much if anything to support Firefox, unlike IE11 it
| adheres to web standards.
| cogman10 wrote:
| And has stayed relatively up to date. That was the biggest
| PITA with IE is that it would be years behind other
| browsers in what APIs it supported and you needed a big
| painful update to the next major version to get new stuff.
|
| IMO, MS has really mismanaged the IE product. The fact that
| there is now a legacy edge is really silly, why did they
| fork that instead of just making one of the version
| upgrades be a "Ok, this is a new change to the rendering
| engine which is fairly major".
|
| Their aversion to making anyone unhappy is just silly.
| Chrome and Firefox have done a much better job with major
| rendering/js engine upgrades saying "Sorry some things are
| busted now, get use to it".
| mumblemumble wrote:
| My understanding is that they didn't have an option. IE
| has so many idiosyncrasies that they couldn't make it
| compatible with modern Web standards and simultaneously
| retain compatibility with sites that were built for IE.
|
| Better to write a new browser so that enterprise clients
| can use both - one for their legacy apps and the other
| for new stuff and the modern web - while they get
| everything migrated over one at a time. Versus, changing
| IE in place would have forced clients to rewrite
| everything overnight, which would have been a much, much
| worse situation.
| wackget wrote:
| Maybe if they stopped trying to ape Chrome and actually
| focused on being a decent browser on their own...
| NeutronStar wrote:
| What's not decent about Firefox?
| asddubs wrote:
| seems that for IE11 alone it's 1.8%
| swyx wrote:
| i'm aware. i was holding off until all of IE is unequivocally
| 1.9% before jumping the gun. but someone already went and
| pestered them today. there needs to be no debate.
| rk06 wrote:
| When looking at IE users, the percentage of users using only IE
| would be smaller.
|
| Especially, since microsoft is now supporting MS edge on windows
| 10.
|
| Moreover even if some old app is using vbscript or some arcane IE
| only stuff, then they are unlikely to modify the app,let alone
| adopt Vue.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Webmasters should redirect their IE users to https://browser-
| update.org/update.html?force_outdated=true
| toddmorey wrote:
| I definitely think they made the right call here. Even Microsoft
| is dropping support in Office 365.
|
| Commendable, too, that they are working to backport some v3
| features to the v2 codebase.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I wondered if this might happen when I first read that they were
| planning to release a Vue 2.7 backporting some 3.0 features to
| the 2.x branch.
|
| Never seemed much point doing that _and_ an IE port of 3.0,
| especially considering that 2.x works great on IE (even back to
| IE9 with transforms and polyfills!) if you absolutely have to
| support it.
| warpech wrote:
| You can't have evolution without dropping ties to the past from
| time to time. That's about time to drop IE11 to take full
| advantage of modern Web features.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| How much more does the web really need to evolve though? Maybe
| IE 11 already had all the features that the web platform really
| needs, and the upgrade treadmill is now being driven by nothing
| more than our insatiable demand for convenience as spoiled
| developers. Pity the users who can't keep up with the
| treadmill.
| rk06 wrote:
| Web needs a lot. Web standards i.e. html,css and js are
| always evolving and web needs to evolve with it.
|
| IE11 is frozen in time. and won't support any newer tech,
| think about web components, HTTP 3 etc.
| cuddlecake wrote:
| Coincidentally, Angular is going to deprecate IE11 support with
| Angular 12, and remove it with Angular 13
|
| https://blog.angular.io/angular-v12-is-now-available-32ed51f...
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Must be something in the water today. Although I quite like a
| coordinated attack on my most hated browser, so I'm not
| complaining.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| I don't recall anyone talking about removing support for
| Safari though.
| cuddlecake wrote:
| I'm working with Angular on my dayjob, I wish they'd just
| deprecate the entire framework
| cout wrote:
| Angularjs (aka Angular 1.x) is supposedly being
| deprecated.
|
| There are enough sites out there still using it in
| production that I'll be surprised if nobody steps in to
| pick up development.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I find it amusing that people complain about React not being
| stable enough, and yet it still supports IE9 as Angular and Vue
| both look to remove IE11 support.
| bearjaws wrote:
| I am counting down the days until our customers stop using IE11,
| most of them offer the option of IE11 or Edge.
|
| We have so little traffic from it now, and the browser renders
| far slower than Edge / Chrome. Habits are hard to kick in
| enterprise.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| These cats make a 5% raise every year I don't think scumbag IT
| decision makers will ever die they will soon be able to afford
| advanced AI constructs to house their consciousness. IE11 will
| never die screenshot this post its only 2021 right now.
| al2o3cr wrote:
| TBH the only reason some clients are all the way on IE11 is
| because IE10 doesn't support TLS1.2, so they HAD to move to pass
| a security audit.
| dspillett wrote:
| Yep. And "some clients" includes "large companies in the UK's
| banking industry".
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| This is obviously great overall, developing for IE is a pain. One
| weird anecdote though, I have an old laptop that has very little
| memory, running Windows 10. And I swear, IE11 works better than
| Chrome and Edge for websites that support it. Chromium seriously
| seems to crash my computer because of some memory issue. Any idea
| why this happens (regarding IE performing better)?
|
| I only know this because I maintain a CSS framework that supports
| IE11, so I have to use IE quite a bit.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I used to have a similar issue on my laptop. IE was the only
| browser capable of viewing YouTube videos at 1080p without
| stutter. Firefox would stutter, as would Chrome and Chromium
| Edge.
|
| I've since given the laptop a clear out, reinstalling Windows
| 10 and installing Kubuntu as well. The issue has now gone away.
| Firefox now copes fine from either OS.
| yannoninator wrote:
| Who still uses IE11 anyway?
| bovermyer wrote:
| Not sure. Globally, IE has 0.71% browser market share. SOMEONE
| is using it.
| goda90 wrote:
| I work writing enterprise software. IE is integrated into our
| legacy desktop client so we can render new web pieces until
| everything is updated to be web, then we'll switch to Electron
| for the client. It's a huge pain to get things like CSS to work
| right, and the dev tools are super buggy.
| omh wrote:
| This week I've been dealing with an IE11 related problem from a
| C# app.
|
| The C# app is built using WebBrowser Control[1] which is
| tightly integrated with the app itself. WebBrowser only
| supports IE11 but the webapps that it connects to are
| increasingly dropping support.
|
| The vendor is reluctant to upgrade their app because the
| replacement options apparently (?) require extensive
| refactoring to get the same integration.
|
| IE11 seems to be in a weird limbo. But the fact that it's still
| technically supported by Microsoft means that conservative
| software vendors aren't forced to migrate.
|
| [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/con...
| tester34 wrote:
| How about WebView2?
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2
| omh wrote:
| I've been asking the vendor the same question!
|
| They seem to think it's not a drop-in replacement and don't
| want to rework their code to deal with the changes. I'm not
| sure to what extent this is Microsoft making compatibility
| hard or just a lazy vendor.
| adzm wrote:
| It is a completely different API compared to
| WebBrowser/MSHTL. It is akin to using CEF (Chromium
| Embedded Framework) for the most part. This can require
| rewriting pretty much everything that interacts with the
| browser currently as well as dealing with a completely
| different threading and event model in the new APIs (both
| WebView2 and WebKit/CEF/etc)
| speedgoose wrote:
| Some legacy Windows software are stuck with IE 11 for their
| webviews.
| nextweek2 wrote:
| This is an old joke: Those downloading Chrome.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 14% of the users of my application. In the US.
|
| Yeah, it's practically gone from the public web. But when you
| look at business stuff, there is a lot more IE out there still
| than people realize.
| H12 wrote:
| Employees who are forced to use it at work.
|
| Some large companies put installation restrictions on third-
| party software for security reasons, and find that throwing
| money at Microsoft for an enterprise support contract is
| cheaper than re-engineering their ancient internal software to
| work on something other than IE.
|
| And because these are also the types of giant companies that
| tend to shit money, there are plenty of mid-sized B2B saas
| companies willing to bend over backwards to win a contract and
| earn their droppings.
|
| So I'm sure there are a good few developers forced to support
| IE11 by a bad contract who will be bummed by this news.
|
| But full deprecation has to happen eventually, and it will only
| help the effort to have engineers telling middle management
| "the project will take twice as long because we have to support
| IE11".
| o_m wrote:
| This used to be the case, but not anymore. The new Edge
| browser has IE mode which makes the browser behave like IE
| 11. Only those using Windows XP and Vista won't be able to
| use the new Edge browser, but they have bigger issues, like
| not getting any security updates.
| ta988 wrote:
| Some lab equipment with internal HTTP servers require IE6 to be
| configured . And they are still sold... It is almost usable in
| IE11 but you have to disable tons of safeties.
| [deleted]
| jackdh wrote:
| Speaking from previous experience it's likely legacy systems
| built for even older IE's (8,9,10) were patched to IE11 but not
| any further due to time (money) involved.
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