Vue 3 drops IE11 support plan
github.com
github.com
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.
The only real remaining argument I can think of for IE11 is if you still have business-critical, legacy ActiveX applications.
It's why I call out bullshit whenever I hear Android is Linux.
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.
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-...
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
You'll be sitting pretty on standards, or you'll be able to just target Chrome and forget about standards?
Additionally, found this recent post going into why Safari is hot garbage. https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/
While the File System Access API is still being developed, I'm not holding my breath for it to appear on iOS. To be fair, it isn't supported yet on mobile Chrome (for Android obviously), but I expect it will be added quickly after the v1 of the API is finalized. I expect it will either never appear on iOS or it will take 5+ years from now...
One thing that WebKit does better than other browsers on OSX is hooking into the native rendering APIs. That’s something that Firefox does a shoddy job at.
I’m told Gecko is a lot better now though.
It really gives management no opportunity to stand still on this anymore.
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.
...and damn. IE6 was released in 2001, and the last update was 2008.
By 2012, IE9 was the norm, and IE 10 came out late in the year. That's also around the time that Chrome started gaining significant market share.
Also a browser that is years behind current has a trail of breadcrumbs in terms of fixed bugs for newer versions. It is probably nearly as bad as the built-in option.
Correct. Those versions of Windows will not bet getting any crucial or critical updates.
You're better off trying to see if ReactOS / FreeDOS will run the damn thing.
It is funny how “moving forward” without brakes tacitly demands that others must clear the path and lay the tracks in order to prevent crashes.
"This site requires an insecure browser."
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.)
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.
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.
We’re now sort of unofficially NOT supporting IE 11 in so much as new features don’t get tested until someone complains.
What’s been interesting is that all of our government employees’ IT do have Chrome, Edge Chromium, and sometimes even FF installed, but the individual users are still trying to use IE11, and often will not accept “you must use one of the other browsers that you have available” as an option.
We’ve even gotten support tickets from customers about “broken features” which then acknowledged in their email that “they tried in Chrome and it worked”. One incident even acknowledged they had to use Chrome for other internal apps, but preferred to use ours in IE.
We SHOULD be pulling our support fully for it, because literally every customer has their choice of browser installed.
But users are so used to their IE they refuse to use anything else, and my boss seems to be happy accommodating that.
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/
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".
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.
When you add that + longevity in deeply integrated enterprise software, everything makes more sense.
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.
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.
Edge in Enterprise Mode solves this as you provide edge with a list of sites that need IE, then Edge will automatically open those sites in IE Tab (or in previous versions of Edge, redirect the user automatically to IE)
Our Asian enterprise customers use IE11 by a staggering majority, even with Edge installed on their machine.
– 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.)
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
It’s all a question of trade-offs of course
I got used to losing it eventually after switching over, but I do remember it being a painful transition for me too.
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. ;)
[1] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#browsers
Bottom line: Web developers should not feel obligated to keep supporting IE 11 for the sake of screen reader users.
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.
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)
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.
So this reflects my experience as well.
Microsoft is offering IE11 extended support until at least 2025, so I wouldn't bet on that.
Granted, this is the same codebase that has an element on their login page named "acceptCredintials", so... that's the starting point.
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
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.
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.
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?
But even if we could use the "latest version" a quick google image search for "Oracle EBS screenshots" shows that UI-wise, not much has changed. Maybe they got rid of the insipid flash-light icon? I didn't want to get too stressed by looking closely.
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.
It might not be IE6 stable, but better than running nightly.
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.
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.
As with a phone, if it bothers the employees (it'd certainly bother me) have them buy a laptop for work only.
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.
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.
I love working in healthcare but the hospital side is atrocious in my experience.
In the US the number has dropped significantly over the past five years (it was >50% but is now under 25%).
I will try to get the name tomorrow.
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.
Me personally, I want my sites to be accessible from libraries, that old device in the closet you're attached to, survival centers and shelters, old kiosks stuck in the corner of a community space somewhere, and all other kinds of scenarios I haven't even imagined, but I don't want to leave those users out in the cold.
https://blog.angular.io/angular-v12-is-now-available-32ed51f...
There are enough sites out there still using it in production that I'll be surprised if nobody steps in to pick up development.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/mi....
Commendable, too, that they are working to backport some v3 features to the v2 codebase.
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.
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.
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.
Thankfully, with IE gone, the "lowest common denominator" is now pretty awesome.
I just wish we had that with email rendering engines.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It won't affect their daily lives directly, but being able to access the knowledge scattered around the web is very important to human development in general.
What I wrote above is a kind of slippery slope argument, but it's a slope that I'm sure we're sliding down very quickly. You can't even read a technical blog these days without loading a whole SPA framework. If we keep going down this path, it will legitimately begin to impact the ability of people with older devices to access any information at all apart from those delivered through a handful of walled garden apps.
> In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content.
Completely agreed!
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.
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?
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".
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)).
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.
Much respect.
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.
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.
Dropping support for IE is the right thing to do at this point.
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.
but honestly, we've ALWAYS had these issues, you should've been there when we had to support IE on Mac
- Easily less than 1% market share
- IE11 is side by side packaged with some version of Edge in almost every case
This seems reasonable.
IE11 is frozen in time. and won't support any newer tech, think about web components, HTTP 3 etc.
However, for those who see a Web browser as an application runtime, IE11 should be out of question. Vue is an application framework, and as such, it should benefit from all the improvements in the Web platform implemented in the modern Web browsers.
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...
(Unless you're building something like Figma of course).
I only know this because I maintain a CSS framework that supports IE11, so I have to use IE quite a bit.
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.
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?
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?
function isIE() {
return /Trident\/|MSIE/.test(window.navigator.userAgent);
}Best to keep the IE 11 warning code in a separate (nomodule?) script file
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.
We have so little traffic from it now, and the browser renders far slower than Edge / Chrome. Habits are hard to kick in enterprise.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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".
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.
I'm surprised to learn a framework the size of Vue was still supporting it until now.
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
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.
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.
If a site loads in IE6 stay the hell away from it.