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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
Holy Sh*t. That means a: users can install software and b: they listen to some vendor telling them to install stuff. I'm shocked either still happens.
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.
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?
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-security-chief-ie-is...
- Convince bajillion dollar investment banks to switch web browsers just to use our service
- Accept a mild decrease in developer experience
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
- For some websites (e.g. government) it is important not to "lose" even 1% of the potential userbase -- it's another type of accessibility
- For some websites, IE 11 usage will be considerably more than 1% in the first place
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-...
> 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.
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.
[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/31/building-dark-mode-on-...
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.
I hate supporting IE, but that has always been the appeal of bootstrap for me.
But they can't really stay relevant and keep supporting IE.
As much as i hate ie11 we have to still support it as its used in many businesses using our softwares
And with time, your product that's built on Bootstrap v4 (or earlier) is only going to continue decaying.
Of people who actually order:
Of people who actually order:
Unfortunately total orders will drop...During the weekend this kind of traffic drops significantly, which means to me that people using IE have to, and not choose to.