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Comment by KMnO4 | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe that's a valid excuse in 2021. In 2017? Sure -- maybe. Even complete luddites don't use IE anymore because it hasn't been the default browser for many, many years.

While I agree there ARE some industries that have to support stupid old versions (eg government websites), any other product managers that think they'll be losing business by not supporting IE are misguided.

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IE11 is officially supported for another year. IE compatibility mode is supported in Edge until 2029. Large organisations move very slowly.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/i...

Yeah, from personal experience any time I or anybody else tries to argue that supporting IE isn’t worth it any more, a PM will pull out traffic statistics and say ‘see, x% is still on IE, we can’t not support them’

according to caniuse it's less than a percent now. of course mileage may vary.

Right, like I noted elsewhere some industries have higher IE traffic, proportionally speaking

It used to be that many companies were stuck with IE because they bought complex products that only support IE (and an older version of IE at that) to manage their business with. Fortunately a lot of the worst of that stuff has gone away. But it's still out there (though in many cases the employees use IE only to talk to BogusLegacyProduct and use Chrome for everything else).

As an example, a school website I run support for on and off, and have done so for a number of years, still receives 18% of its traffic from IE8.

a bunch of school computers running XP? Or maybe the principal still runs xp and only 4 other people visit the site

No, in point of fact most of those 18% are parents at home running Windows XP. The entire school runs on Windows 10, as the cursing from the server room will tell you on a regular basis.

And the school site has quite an active userbase - students upload assignments via it, parents can live-view all gradings and remarks (and regularly use it), and staff generally access their email via it instead of a client.

interesting, i guess it must be people who almost don't have an internet presence at all beyond school. since in ie8, nothing works at this point (i imagine their kids might have their own computers). hell, a huge swath of https sites just flat out won't work in XP as i understand (e.g. anything with a let's encrypt certificate)

Soon you'll be able to respond that even Microsoft is dropping support for IE. The IE application itself is reaching end of life on June 15th, 2022 [1] but Microsoft's own products will no longer support IE later this year in August [2].

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/i...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/int...

> a PM will pull out traffic statistics and say ‘see, x% is still on IE, we can’t not support them’

Sure, which can be countered with: "no problem, it will add 30% to the estimate".

Unless the % is significant (over 10%), it's not worth the effort.

Yep, that's exactly why I keep pushing to drop support. I am as interested as the PM in implementing a feature as efficiently as possible, and when I have to cadge together a js solution for something that's in CSS or, worse, cadge together IE-specific CSS overrides (truth be told, I have to do this for Safari often too), it automatically increases the estimation.

> truth be told, I have to do this for Safari often too

One day Safari will enable smooth scroll.

You then respond with “is x% worth y% longer time to market for new features, and n milliseconds longer load time for users on other browsers?”

Also don’t forget to check actual conversion and other important metrics for different browsers, not only number of visits.

I was only able to ditch IE for a major customer last year thanks to the new Edge rollout on Windows 10 and Microsoft setting a precedent with their own online services (Teams especially). Moving away from old workarounds to newer technologies will be a gradual process over the coming years.

The problem isn't just IE marketshare. Not every web developer works in e-commerce, on brochure sites or even SaaS apps with a target audience consisting almost entirely of other startups. If you build products for mostly enterprise customers, those customers often dictate what you support, even if they barely even use it anymore. Changing requirements can be difficult.

I remember being asked by a large international company to build a web app in "HTML5 but it must work with IE6" back in the day. Most of their actual users were on Firefox or using iPads.

Government, healthcare, many other industries that don't move as quickly for various reasons.

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