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Comment by pfalke | Hacker News Reader

„...all major browsers“

Is Internet Explorer not a major browser anymore? I’m talking relevant as in your webpage needs to work fine in Internet Explorer.

For example, my company still has Internet Explorer configured as default browser as Edge is not compatible with some internal pages.

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IE is not a major browser anymore

http://gs.statcounter.com/

Look at your Google Analytics, it's really not that important anymore.

I would have agreed until looking at desktop browsers in the US[1] which would make Firefox not a major browser, too.

    Chrome   56.69%
    IE       12.69%
    Firefox  11.14%
    Safari    9.84%
    Edge      7.86%

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/unite...

In corporate env it is.

Either the computers in these mysterious corporate environments are exposed to the internet, in which case they'd be reflected in these public stats collected by them visiting public websites from IE, or they aren't, in which case they don't matter in the slightest because they're not going to visit webpages using WebAssembly.

IE can account for a fraction of total traffic, but it still can affect large percentage of users. The same person can use several devices (work, home, mobile) to browse the web at different times. I can't recount how many times I saw some page at work only to send myself the link to read it later. I'm not forced to use IE anywhere, but if I were, loosing that initial visit would also lower the number of visits from other browsers.

Or, as is absolutely the case, because of the aggressive blocking and monitoring policies and restrictive usage policies in place in the kind of enterprises where IE remains common, they are exposed to the public internet and use public webpages, but with usage patterns which leave them underrepresented on the kind of sites that use third-party stat counters. OTOH, for certain other public websites, they are very large numbers of users.

It's important because of internal websites stuck in the past. I doubt you'll ever need web assembly support for those.

Yeah, you could just run IE6 inside Chrome/Firefox via wasm :)

We had a large customer that for years wouldn't drop a requirement for IE6. It meant for horrendous backward compatibility requirements in code. Personally, I hope to never be in that situation again.

I anticipate that IE will never gain support for WebAssembly, and your company will eventually change its default.

I don't think internal corporate pages count as supporting a major browser. ;)

Most development I see nowadays supports only IE11 and is about to drop that one too in favor of Edge. IE is on its way to deprecation right now.

That doesn't mean IE is a major browser, just like Windows XP is not a major OS simply because some old hospital equipment and ATMs still rely on it.

A few years ago, we started thinking "maybe if we ignore IE long enough, it will go away?" Looks like we aren't quite there yet...

But in the mean time, it's very helpful to encourage companies to base their browsers on standards, and move away from outdated software -- at least a s security precaution.

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