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Comment by egonschiele | Hacker News Reader

I've heard that the people who use IE11 are the ones who don't have a choice, because maybe they are using a computer at a library, or some kind of accessibility-related device. Does anyone on HN know of solid data to back this claim? This screenreader[1] survey for example says 11% of their users use IE11, though that is from 2019.

[1] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#browsers

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Look, something I’m finally qualified to answer! At my previous job our customers were a representative sample of the Fortune 500 and about 40% of our users (their employees) were on IE11 just a few months ago. There were some very well known companies that used IE11 exclusively. It’s very quickly changing and this might be the year when it finally goes away, but it’s still alive and well in the corporate world.

We got a huge company using IE11, they could not update to Chrome because "it was not secure" according to their IT department

They probably had to rotate their password three times while writing that memo.

That's odd. Both Chrome and Firefox have strong "enterprise" controls now, well integrated with Windows/Active Directory/etc.

The biggest issue with newer browsers is actually probably the feature cycle. Every couple months browsers introduce at least one horrible feature I need to update our policies to disable.

Firefox does ESR - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/choosing-firefox-update...

It might not be IE6 stable, but better than running nightly.

I generally do the normal Firefox release and just put up with it, but I can understand why larger organizations might be frustrated with keeping modern browsers secure. They're worried about info leaks while browser vendors are interested in figuring out how to hook websites up to USB devices and VR headsets, and figuring out how to ad new advertising experiences to the new tab page.

Technically that's true since none of the browsers are. But not a very good justification obviously.

I mean, considering the surface area of a browser.... they seem pretty damn solid to me. Am I missing something?

Yes, considering the surface area they are relatively secure. But the surface area is absolutely massive and I have no doubt in my mind that there are multiple full remote code execution zero-days in all major browsers.

Treating security as an absolute is rarely useful because very few things are completely secure. No browser will be completely secure for the foreseeable future.

It's a great justification if you see just how much Google's spyware browser phones home...

Huh, my last company was very successful in the enterprise space, selling to tonnes of Fortune 500 companies and government organizations, and IE11 was <2% of users for us. We were preparing to deprecate support for it around the time I left.

>It’s very quickly changing and this might be the year when it finally goes away

Microsoft is offering IE11 extended support until at least 2025, so I wouldn't bet on that.

IE11: yes. IE11 "integrated into anything you were using IE11 for": no. MS is working hard to make sure that it fulfills its contractual obligation with respect to IE11's EOL, but it's at the same time removing it from everywhere it was traditionally integrated so that it can die a proper death. It'll be officially supported for as long as Windows 10 is a thing, but they're going to make it as useless as possible outside of "just being an old browser that's incompatible with today's web".

Yeah, it's been made clear for some time that MS considers IE11 a compatibility platform and don't recommend it as a "browser".

Great… thanks Microsoft…

50% of our users (all big corporations) are still on IE too.

I promise that this isn't a snarky question.

Why has it taken so long for corp America to move off of IE? There are so many other better alternatives.

I still sometimes have flashbacks of having to design around and support IE6. /shudder

I still have IE installed so that I can run ONE god-forsaken enterprise application known as Oracle EBS (Enterprise Business Suite). For everything else I use Chrome.

Oracle EBS uses NPAPI (AKA Java Plugins AKA Java Applets). Chrome dropped support for NPAPI years ago, and since then we've been using IE to whenever we need to use Oracle EBS.

I understand that the latest version of Oracle EBS might now support the cutting-edge technology of Java Web Start to continue to deliver their 1990's era grey-blah UI's with shitty layout. I don't even care to ask about upgrades.

Negotiating with the bean-counter types that have enabled Oracle to put it's slimy tentacles into every critical area of the business is a dreadful, thankless task. I expect it will keep running, at its current version, long after I leave or retire. At some point, I expect employees will need to spin up VM's to open IE to use the f-ing thing-- perhaps they can set it up in their "forever" dream OS, Windows NT with IE4?

That's actually probably the best approach: make some Citrix hosts running IE11 and let people use those when they actually need to touch the legacy software. Then you can upgrade everything else.

It sounds like you (or your enterprise) has chosen not to upgrade you applications. That's fine. But it's hardly fair to blame the vendor for your choice of not upgrading.

I agree it's not entirely fair, but yes, the bulk of the blame has to go to the corporate derps that keep it running and love it.

But even if we could use the "latest version" a quick google image search for "Oracle EBS screenshots" shows that UI-wise, not much has changed. Maybe they got rid of the insipid flash-light icon? I didn't want to get too stressed by looking closely.

Easy reason: why spend money (and reduce quarterly profit) if the software is still supported by the vendor for another two years? Let it be the problem of the CTO of two years from now.

In two years the C-level/VP responsible has long since taken the golden parachute and his successor is stuck with the bill.

Also, any sort of internal IT stuff is exclusively seen as a cost center by the MBA bean counters. Stuff like employees leaving due to outdated IT isn't something quantifiable in impact unless you have entire departments walking away at once.

I used to work in IT at a Fortune 100 manufacturing company. IE versions hung around for a long time because there was a lot of software that was built with only IE in mind and only received the bare minimum of support.

In some cases this was off the shelf software from vendors who had gone out of business. In other cases it was software built in house that would require a complete rewrite to modernize.

All of this software was tightly integrated into processes that were critical for the company to operate. While the cost of replacing the old software was a consideration, the biggest concern was the potential disruption to operations.

If a software change reduced productivity or even worse caused work to stop entirely, it meant millions in financial impact.

I think it is two reasons

1) Sometimes companies go out of business or stop supporting\updating things. If you build critical processes around these outdated tools, it can be very difficult to change.

2) Users aren't savvy enough to know when to use Chrome, Firefox or IE. Some aren't even savvy enough to call things the correct names (looking at you Mozzarella Foxfire). So they just settle on on a lowest common denominator.

I think if they are shown that moving off IE is gonna increase the profits then they'll do it in a week

FWIW, some parts of US HHS are just rolling out Chrome support, and there's still not full coverage of all functionality.

Granted, this is the same codebase that has an element on their login page named "acceptCredintials", so... that's the starting point.

Is the new Edge changing that?

All Windows screen readers with any significant user base have supported Chromium and Firefox for a while now. The old EdgeHTML engine didn't work so well with third-party Windows screen readers, so some blind users may have held onto IE 11 because of that. But any Windows screen reader that works with Chrome also works with the Chromium-based Edge. And note that the WebAIM survey you released was from before the Chromium-based Edge started being pushed to the broader Windows user base.

Bottom line: Web developers should not feel obligated to keep supporting IE 11 for the sake of screen reader users.

We build websites for organisations in the UK who do a lot of work with the NHS, and we regularly still see ~10% visits from IE11 in Google Analytics. Organisations that don’t work with the NHS consistently show < 2%, so although I don’t have conclusive proof I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on for us.

I wonder how much of a sampling bias there is. It's plausible to me that users of non-IE11 browsers are more likely to be using ad/tracking blockers which block Google Analytics. That could skew the relative population of "users who ran Google Analytics" towards more IE11 users.

Were you able to use other sources than Google Analytics to look at the browser population? I imagine working with the NHS that things like HTTP access logs are harder to wrangle (if they exist at all)

For clarity, we don't build websites for NHS bodies, we build sites for some external organisations that work with the NHS, so logs would be relatively easy if it felt worth it. GA is my only source, but my hunch is that use of blockers is pretty consistent across clients whose visitors are mostly from businesses or institutions, and I see this differential across those audiences. Having spoken to people who work in the NHS Digital team there are definitely pockets of IE use, although it's been getting better - the shift sped up quite a bit after the Wannacry attack.

I work on an NHS focused web app, if it's pockets they're pretty deep ones.

We have basic first party analytics of the NHS users of our software (mainly just browser versions actually), and it's probably a little over half of them are using IE11 still. My impression from talking to some of them is that most of them now have both Chrome and IE11 available on their machines, and it's just which one they're using. I'm sure that's uniform everywhere though.

People using IE 11 “because they have to” is a hard thing to quantify without some sort of survey.

I say this because even though your anecdote rings true, I’ve seen many people in offices use IE 11 purely out of ignorance and comfort reasons rather than because they were forced. They had Edge, Firefox installed but stuck with IE because no one told them to stop using it.

We may be underestimating the portion of “if it ain’t broke why fix it” crowd are using IE 11 but it’s hard to say with statistical data alone.

Anyway, regardless of how it’s sliced, it’s low enough now for libraries to start dropping.

We're writing apps for mostly local government users, almost all of who use IE11 because it continues to have Java Applet support.

Some of these Applet-based things have been migrated to modern web, but many still haven't, since it is almost 15+ years of software development now needing to be re-written.

There have been discussions about Edge's "IE Mode" but unfortunately that only applies to domain joined machines, and they have a BYOD policy.

Can you not have the employees join the domain, like how some companies let you enroll in Exchange on a personal phone in exchange for allowing device administration/remote wipe?

As with a phone, if it bothers the employees (it'd certainly bother me) have them buy a laptop for work only.

I think you mean, have the employer buy that laptop/phone for them. The employer provides an, imo, unreasonable ask, then they should have to provide the alternative.

Biggest reason is corporate/government IT that's been slow to upgrade, possibly because they have intranet sites that don't support newer browsers. Accessibility is available (and better) in modern browsers.

Bingo, just commented, this is exactly what happens.

I do some server work for a small company that sells a downloadable product whose target audience is ordinary people, probably not too technologically sophisticated when it comes to computers.

It is unlikely someone would purchase from anywhere than their home Windows PC, and I don't think many are using accessibility-related devices (the site was using a third party component that turned out to be terrible for accessibility, and it was years before anyone complained about it (and we then replaced it with one that was accessible)).

I just took a look at the logs for the past 12 months. Here are the relative numbers of successful orders by browser, normalized to Firefox on Windows 10 = 100.

On Windows 10: Chrome 602, IE11 116, Firefox 100, Edge 94.

On Windows 8: Chrome 44, Firefox 16, IE11 14, IE10 4.

On Windows 7: Chrome 76, Firefox 40, IE11 30, IE9 2.

On Vista: Chrome 8, Firefox 4.

On XP: Chrome 6, Firefox 2.

Basically. I work in the B2B online education space and many large businesses use IE11 on hardware that supports other browsers just fine. Part of it is that they use decades-old intranets that only support IE officially so they were stuck. We noticed since around early pre-pandemic 2020 (and accelerated by the pandemic), that IE users are becoming Chrome and Chromium Edge users. Our pet theory is that the Microsoft EoL pushed IT departments to just make the jump and then WFH pushed many to new hardware where they might have a choice. Also our product is far worse in IE as Trident's JS Engine truly is horrific and our whole site is much faster in Chrome. We saw IE use drop to under 10% now from ~35% around two and a half years ago.

IE11 is over 10% on the sites I build. Even when IE11 becomes only .5% of my users, I will support it.

I work in healthcare, so I don't get to make lazydev excuses about time constraints and "edge cases." The people still using IE are the people who need my web sites the most.

> I work in healthcare, so I don't get to make lazydev excuses about time constraints and "edge cases."

If I were to read this statement uncharitably, I would conclude that there is plenty of money in healthcare to be wasted on supporting outdated technology, adding to the already outrageous costs of healthcare. Furthermore, if you're not lazy, you're probably creating unnecessary work.

> The people still using IE are the people who need my web sites the most.

From a holistic welfare perspective, giving these people a modern web browser would be better than maintaining their status quo.

I work in healthcare as well and the health IT landscape is horrifying. Hospitals not hiring software engineers is part of the reason you end up with thirty-person implementation teams from firms like Epic and GE trying to config their way out integration hell. Trying to integrate a new product via HL7 is a special hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. It's the only standard I've worked with where nobody even attempts to follow the spec, and everyone else is just expected to conform to whatever arbitrary changes the hospital made (both intentionally, and accidentally). The vast majority of IT management is completely non-technical, especially - paradoxically - at larger institutions. At small community places the IT director is typically the person who was setting up the doctors' computers ten years prior. At huge practices it's someone with an MHA or who hasn't done anything remotely technical since the 90's.

I love working in healthcare but the hospital side is atrocious in my experience.

I know there is a CURRENT Microsoft product (for administration) that requires IE11. I do not remember what it is but I was really surprised when our Microsoft guru (he is really good) showed it to me and was not happy either.

I will try to get the name tomorrow.

That's the thing, the edge cases are a long tail of accessibility challenges, and most of today's developers are OK with just telling that 1% or 5% tail to pound sand.

Me personally, I want my sites to be accessible from libraries, that old device in the closet you're attached to, survival centers and shelters, old kiosks stuck in the corner of a community space somewhere, and all other kinds of scenarios I haven't even imagined, but I don't want to leave those users out in the cold.

There is medical software here in the Netherlands, that, to this day, still recommends using IE11 for the best experience.

My companies thin client has to support IE11 because we run on lots of lock down industrial control systems that run Windows 7 or Windows 10 IoT and cannot have any other browser installed.

So this reflects my experience as well.

I'm counting 0.9% under our users (which is of course a biased group, but at least near being representative for region, gender, age and education) since 2020-01-01, but only 0.2% since 2021-01-01. So it seems be dropping quite steadily.

Edit: a few of the IE11 user agent strings even mention Windows NT 6.1, and no x64 or WOW/Win64, so I guess they're still running 32 bit Windows 7.

Depends on where they live, but our Asian enterprise customers are >70% on IE11, even with Edge installed on most of their machines.

In the US the number has dropped significantly over the past five years (it was >50% but is now under 25%).

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