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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

Quick check-in: who here is still supporting IE? Please provide as much detail about your website (industry, audience, usage) as possible.

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I still occasionally maintain a website for a school, with stats that'll horrify you.

Around 78% of browsers hitting the site are running IE8, and these will be parents making use of the portal to do stuff like check calendar dates, book appointments to see teachers, and check student grades.

We tried extremely hard to move the community onwards, including outreach to upgrade computers for families and so on. But in the end, they just don't want to move on from Windows XP because everything else is too confusing. Even if you make it look the same.

As for how often they're using the site... It's somewhere around 1/3rd of the parents hit it at least once a day using an outdated browser.

... Whilst their kids are using school-provided Thinkpads all running on Windows 10, or recent-ish school-provided iPads. (The school does all the maintenance on them as well).

I don't remember there was any computer in any of my schools that didn't use IE exclusively and still do, I presume.

Windows xp + IE + elicipse + office 2003 or 2007 I think.

Is this in the USA?

Farming community in Australia.

I used to work in school IT.

If Google and Mozilla aren't going to step up their "managed browser" game then we're going to continue seeing MS and Apple dominate education. It's not like school IT depts like running IE, but it's basically the only browser you can lock down.

"But you shouldn't lock down kids' browsers, and let them have blah blah..."

Okay look, I don't actually give two shits if little Marcus wants to browse Pornhub on his school laptop, we're honestly not paid enough to care. But we do have administration breathing down our necks, school policies to enforce, and angry detached parents to appease.

Oh, the school itself had fully moved to Firefox. Not quite as easy as IE, but a few group policies and you're mostly done.

It was the parents who refused to move beyond XP.

Chrome has all kinds of enterprisy management stuff now

You absolutely can manage Firefox, you can even keep doing it using GPOs.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-enterpris...

I’m not doubting you, but how is that even possible? How do these people visit any other website? I don’t think much works in IE8 nowadays.

The only way I think this could happen is if everyone is still on Windows XP. Probably because pirated winxp was still being circulated when the parents installed.

Still hard for me to believe the figures though. 78%??? Wonder which country they live in.

I've seen things like that here in Mexico but not winxp, and not in 2020. And not to younger parents with kids who can use computers. Maybe they're in China or something where pirated winxp still apparently flourishes.

No, Australia. Just a farming community where you can't guarantee every household even has a computer (hence school-provided for students).

Most of the parents I dealt with treated technology like it might be infectious, and they didn't want to get sick. Most didn't even have email.

Are number of these same parents complained rather loudly when programming was added to the curriculum, because if they didn't understand "the technology", they didn't want it in their home.

Think... The sort of people who print and mail pictures someone found on the internet, because they never touch email.

They don't actually want to visit any website.

Our agency dropped support last week. Our metrics still show ~3% of all traffic comes from some version of IE (that's from the ~450 sites we currently host). It finally hit a point where it was holding us back design wise and adding too much time to be worth it. We're phasing out support so anything sold before the drop date is still entitled to it, but new projects and new features on those old sites will no longer support it going forward.

The sites range from small mom & pop stores to restaurant chains with dozens of locations worldwide to large scale CRMs for larger corporations. We're all over the place. The sites we host, which often do not include our bigger clients, are doing about 30 million unique visitors each week across them currently. Not a massive amount of traffic by any means, but it's still upwards about 400k users we're dropping support for (in addition to about 500k on older versions we already dropped).

Note: all of my metrics are coming from server access logs. Nothing complex any no front end validation of the browser versions (I don't have access to client-side Analytics for each site)

I maintain the priamry website for a winterguard association in south texas. (Colorguard: choreographed waving of flags, usually alongside a marching band or performed to recorded music.)

Because it's an educational organization, we must assume that members are operating on outdated solutions behind weirdly restrictive firewalls. I don't bother to fully support Internet Explorer for all features, but I do need to make sure the critical path at least functions on a basic level, and I'm careful not to rely on any dependencies (analytics, etc) that I cannot self host.

Of course, it's the directors who insist on doing everything on their iPad that give me more trouble, as I don't actually own one to test. :)

> Of course, it's the directors who insist on doing everything on their iPad that give me more trouble, as I don't actually own one to test. :)

Shouldn't they give you one for testing?

Yeah, even new they're fairly cheap…

Not really. :) This organization operates on a shoestring budget, and I volunteer my time to maintain their backend. On the odd occasion that the layout breaks specifically on an iOS device and resists local troubleshooting, I just borrow my Dad's iPad and check it there. I've had much fewer troubles since switching to Semantic UI's media breakpoints though; simply resizing my browser window to "tablet" size catches the vast majority of issues.

Why do you have to assume the outdated devices? Can't you just check? This information is available in http headers.

I suppose we don't! Presuming these aren't bots, here's a count of every hit claiming to be trident (IE 8 - 11) just this month:

    #zgrep -i trident access.log*.gz | wc -l
    580

It's not a huge number of visits to be sure, but we're also a rather small organization and in our off season, so we're not receiving a whole ton of traffic to begin with.

I make a JavaScript/TypeScript library (https://gojs.net) which is used by many enterprise and governmental customers for their internal apps. I still support IE11 (and 10) because of that.

I maintain an online game, pokemonshowdown.com

Gamers tend to be pretty technically inclined, so the audience mostly uses pretty modern browsers.

I support down to ES3 (Safari 5, IE9) mostly because I can (I learned web dev back in the old days and still remember all the tricks), although it's nice to see fans talk about playing on obscure platforms like the Nintendo 3DS browser or a Samsung smart refrigerator.

Animations are implemented in jQuery animations, and the networking is provided by SockJS (which can fall back to JSONP long-polling and even iframes if the browser doesn't support WebSocket).

We're a big eCommerce and we're still supporting IE11. We're close to dropping it but it still shows up at about 4% to 5% of our users. And it's not that hard to support IE11, just need the right Webpack configs and polyfills and etc.

It would be interesting to see if traffic drops by that much, or a significant number of those users keep using your site but with a different browser.

We are. b2b healthcare industry. About half our clients have Chrome available. The rest are still on IE11.

Is it corporate IE policies mandating the use of IE11? I find this so fascinating.

Infosys still requires all employees to access internal applications (time sheet, banking) via internet explorer only.

However the apps developed for clients are for Chrome

I'm picturing Infosys developers using Chrome within an AWS Workspace connection... lol

I support Internet Explorer through https://quik.dev/. It's essentially internet explorer as a service, seriously impressive.

Yeah, that's one niche market (or not niche?). I don't know of any competitors. I am really interested about their customers and how much revenue they are pulling.

Footwear manufacturering/sourcing industry (meaning also targeting footwear brands). B2B with a global crowd; a significant chunk on old company computers (or phones). It's not many, but it's been quite steady at 1-2% of our user base. Since it's fairly easy to support IE11 (not pixel perfect) once everything has been setup, we have to keep it. We're thinking about doing a similar approach as Twitter, but it's not been prioritized yet.

A recent project I worked on b2c, online insurance quotes, the audience is 25-50 ish. Previous analytics were indicating only a small single-digits percentage, but the customer wanted it anyway.

The customer was happy for us to only cover "core functionality" and not visual and minor issues in IE 11.

GitLab employee here. We just have dropped browser support for IE11 in May with our major 13.0. Nobody complained about us removing it despite us announcing it in January. [0]

Already removed some polyfills, biggest win will be transpiling just for modern browsers [1]. This all ties in nicely with general performance initiatives.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/197987

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/36840

Healthcare B2B and B2C.

B2B side has been moving slowly off IE11, but moving faster since the start of the year and with most of the rest of the customers targeting to be off of it originally by end of quarter. Currently sitting around 40% but if they go through with their plans to upgrade by end of quarter then will be around 5%

B2C side is much lower, the users who visit not very frequently or are newer that use IE is low single digits. On the other hand we have some long term continuous use users who use IE at a higher rate than the B2B side

We’re an e-commerce site, and target ie10+ but lately have been relaxing that requirement. We will likely move to no IE support in the next year or two.

Construction (planning), b2b, customer requires it support IE11. It's a web application. For some critical stuff, IE actually has less bugs. :-)

> For some critical stuff, IE actually has less bugs. :-)

Interesting - like what?

SVG in a Flex layout. In both Firefox and Chrome, it overflows the parent container's height. Only in IE does it work correctly. Total PITA.

email provider here. we have less than 2% IE11 users and we still support it as 2% more revenue is still significant amount of money

Atlassian has recently published their last Enterprise releases of Jira and Confluence which will support IE11 for 2 years.

Their cloud offerings dropped IE11 support earlier this year as well.

In the Healthcare world, computers frequently lag behind the state-of-the-art. Writing Healthcare IT webapps, we had to support IE6 up until ~2013. If your nation-wide pharmacy chain customer is primarily running IE10 on outdated Windows PCs they refuse to upgrade, your app had better be very well tested on that browser.

I do. We have to support Java applets (don’t ask) and 32-bit IE is the last browser left standing that supports them.

Microsoft has migrated nearly all non business users to Edge. Using IE gets big scary warnings to use Edge when using Bing and MSN and most consumer websites don’t support it any more. It is safe to assume that IE usage is forced usage by companies. Web developers should boycott companies that use IE.

We support IE11. Mainly high end websites and web apps about employee benefits.

I think one of the main drivers of IE support is clients who will test in IE because it's their default browser or only allowed browser at work.

Digital photography: news and testing, normal visitors are probably all on newer browsers, but during workdays, we get up to 3% IE11 visitors, this falls to under 1 on weekends.

We still support it (www.theguardian.com).

Ecommerce. Among top 20 company in the world. We dedicate one month on every project just to support IE11.

IE11 still accounts for 3% of our audience. We're B2B HR/performance management.

Still too high of a % to ignore.

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