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Comment by kilian | Hacker News Reader

Flexbox is supported in all versions of IE that Microsoft themselves still support (IE 11 and up). You can still support it in IE10 too, albeit with a different syntax.

That means even windows installations that haven't been updated since 2012 will support flexbox.

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Unfortunately that still leaves out a ton of users. I know that's a tiny percentage, but tiny nonetheless. The shop i'm heading to soon has a small number of clients (<5k, each being very important), but with many using ancient systems. IE8/9 iirc. We use Table layouts for our "old compatible" product, and i don't think we'll ever move on from that. Some clients just refuse to update it seems.

Luckily (for my sanity) we have a "new age" product that we can use responsive layouts for.

Supporting old browsers should be treated as a special case though, like "people with js disabled" or something. Then of course you don't use flexbox (or serve different css fles or have a scaled down design or whatever). But the "norm" is that flexbox is now safe for most users.

"Refuse to update" well yes, I would too, refuse to do something that is notoriously breaking a lot of working stuff for no known benefit. For example java applets developped for IE6 that is vital, because it drives the 10 years old exotic scanner, and nobody dares touching it.

CanIUse reports bugs in IE11. Anyone had issues in day-to-day development?

Check here for a pretty comprehensive listing of flexbox-related bugs.

https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs

I haven't come across anything in IE 10 or 11 that I haven't been able to work around pretty easily.

Of course. there are lots of minor issues and surprising results with flexbox in modern IE and Firefox once you use it in more advanced ways. See https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs for an overview.

Nevertheless I use flexbox almost everywhere. It's a great system to arrange anything from general layout to smaller components. There's absolutely no way that I'll deal with any kind of hacks to get basic things like vertical centering right.

Most of them are fixed in https://github.com/suitcss/components-grid

It's still common to find Citrix environments with IE 8/9 here in .nl healthhcare sector

Someone should write an exploit for IE 8/9 that upgrades them to Firefox.

Google did that back in the day with Chrome.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-get...

Discontinued though.

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