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Comment by sjroot | Hacker News Reader

I despise the fact that IE11 is still used, but it’s used by a quarter of our users at the large company I work at.

We don’t use Bootstrap, but hopefully this encourages the companies that do use it to usher their users to something more modern and secure.

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Never underestimate an IT departments ability to not give a fuck. I once got a bug report from a colleague complaining about our website not working in Firefox. I couldn't reproduce it locally, so I got to her computer and realized that Firefox updates (?!) had been blocked. Everyone in that department was stuck on Firefox 12, when the current version was 60+. Turns out that not even evergreen browsers are safe from overzealous policies.

And this was on a pretty big media company with a large digital footprint.

At least govt side sometimes the staff either don't know or don't have a budget so once something works they've learned to absolutely lock everything down has hard as they can so it can't be messed up. This is partly because vendors willing to deal with a govt procurement cycle often are selling total junk (for high prices).

Some crucial thing was broken on Firefox 13, so they blocked the autoupdate. Nobody ever opened a ticket about re-checking if it's still broken on Firefox 14..

What made the change for us is libraries dropping support and us having to upgrade those libraries to be in compliance with our security audits. It's a good thing and more libraries need to force the issue.

We were almost forced to find another library or write our own but we were able to find articles where Microsoft had said publicly that they no longer consider IE11 a browser and it shouldn't be used. It saved our hides.

I don't very much whether this will make much of a difference. Most devs very rarely ever upgrade the version of boostrap once it is in place, on intranet sites. One of the sites my friend supports is built in bootstrap 2.

Typically if 25% of my users use IE11, I will just make sure it works with IE11. If I have to stay use an older version of the library I will just use that unless I can polyfill or patch the lib to work with older versions of IE.

Then again I am kinda strange in the fact that if it should work in an old browser (and time permitting) I will normally make sure it works well enough that it is functional in that browser.

> Most devs very rarely ever upgrade the version of boostrap once it is in place

I think that’s the point.

Those who want IE 11 support will stick with 4, whilst those who want the latest can upgrade to 5.

Are those users forced to use it? Or is it by choice. I spearheaded an effort at my org to restrict access to IE on all PC's that didn't absolutely need it. Which, turned out to be nearly everyone.

Unfortunately, lots of users (mostly older) still associate the internet with "Internet Explorer". Simply telling them to use Chrome or Firefox solved the issue in a lot of cases.

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