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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

If you still support IE11 very little has changed in the last 2-3 years. JQuery is still king. Companies that support large enterprise or government absolutely require IE11 support, since these places are required to use it due to exclusive e.g. Java Applets/Flash/ActiveX, etc.

Microsoft's decision to drop those technologies from Edge was kind a mixed bag. From a security perspective it was the right decision. But it has also stuck many of us developing for a non-evergreen browser, even while our users are on Windows 10.

IE11 is the new IE6.

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It's not just a requirement to use old plugins. There are still serious drawbacks to upgrading from Win7 to Win10, and Edge is not available on Win7, while IE11 is available on Win10 (because Edge wasn't viable yet when Win10 was pushed out.) So the Win7 users that won't use FF/Chrome are stuck with IE11, and many Win10 users continue using IE11 for various reasons. (Familiarity, corporate policy, plugins, etc.)

I think Microsoft has made a mistake by stopping the addition of standards-compliant features to IE11. They should keep supporting it and modernizing it until the userbase has moved to Win10 on its merits, instead of trying to use IE11's aging as a lever to force Win10 adoption.

I believe the mistake is the same one that dates back to IE7/8 in that enterprise customers are at all given the option to always load intranet sites in "compatibility mode". It's really stupid that because of an Oracle-enforced GPO policy every time I try to open most of my company's intranet sites in Edge, GPO policy pops it into a new IE11 window, and corporate-enforced IE11 add-in pops it into a new Chrome window. This is madness, and there's no way for me locally on my machine to tell Windows that no I don't care about the GPO policy, I really just want to open it in Edge and skip the other two browsers entirely.

I do think a mistake was that IE11 was included at all in Windows 10 to appease corporations, instead of just ripping off that particular band-aid. But doubling down on it and allowing corporations to default to nothing but IE11 via group-policy is the biggest mistake. GPO footguns like that are why corporate America can't have nice things, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that it's time Microsoft started dropping footguns from GPO.

(Also, note that the root problem in this particular workplace remains Oracle and their web apps that are stuck in IE6 worst practices but cost millions of dollars each year to continue to operate. Oracle is the real villain here.)

I find that IE11 is surprisingly polyfillable. The biggest issue has been flexbox, since CSS can’t exactly be polyfilled.

This is a bit offtopic, but I find that autoprefixer gets us about 95% of the way there when it comes to flexbox, in case you aren't already using it.

Isn’t there a Grid polyfill somewhere too?

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