I have no love for IE, but does anyone remember when we designed web pages to work on any browser?
Sometimes it's just Google releasing whatever they want, use it on google.com and youtube.com while serving slower/buggier fallbacks to others, so other vendors have no choice but to implement Google's non-standard invention to avoid looking broken.
Google gets away with this a lot, because there are also many actual standards that Safari is ignoring. Without following dozens of mailing lists and bug trackers it's hard to tell what Google is pushing for themselves (e.g. AMP was a motivation for many "standards" proposals), and where others are dragging their feet.
I think the point seen here is really that if the standards org doesn't impact the browsers and the browser in question has greater than 60% market share then that browser is the standards org and the W3C doesn't matter. Who is going to harm Google? How would the W3C enforce their standards? If most of your users are on Chrome and Chrome sets the feature set rather than the W3C, why wouldn't you just build to Chrome?
There was a brief nice moment in history when WebKit, Gecko, Trident, and Presto each had enough market share that all the vendors had to cooperate.
Nowadays Trident and Presto are dead. Gecko is a great engine, but doesn't have enough market share to veto anything. So Blink can ship anything and claim it's supported "everywhere except Safari".
I remember having to support IE 6 through 9, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera.
I think at least 25% of the team’s time was spent on getting IE 6 to behave acceptably.
No built-in browser debugger or ‘developer tools’ for some of those.
I will say, though, there were only a few screen resolutions to consider.
…and lots of <table>s.
Much respect.
It's one thing for a website to look a bit ugly and actions to require a few more clicks when accessed with an outdated browser. It's a completely different thing when you're left staring at a blank screen. The latter is what happens when an entire frontend framework decides that they'd rather give you no experience than a degraded experience because they don't want to maintain polyfills anymore.
I do sympathize with the hate for IE, having suffered it for long enough. But once we've decided that IE users don't deserve anything, who's next? How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice.
First they came for IE, and I did not speak out ... you know how the poem ends.
> How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader?
As far as I know, this was only ever an issue on Windows, and it's not anymore. IMO, the best third-party screen reader for Windows is NVDA [1], and it's free and open-source. Even a user stuck on Windows XP or Vista can get a version of NVDA from 2017 that works well with Chromium (assuming one can get a Chromium-based browser that runs on those old versions of Windows). On all other platforms, the screen reader is built into the platform itself, and updated along with it. Windows itself has had Narrator built in for a long time now, and Narrator in Windows 10 is getting good (disclosure: I was on the Narrator team at Microsoft for 3 years), but there are still valid reasons to use a third-party screen reader on Windows.
Rallying against older browsers was once supposed to be a good fight against evil monopolists. Now it's about kicking away the ladder from people who are already the poorest and most powerless in the world, making them even less able to take advantage of the latest information and communication tools. And we're not even realizing what we're doing because we're so used to the first world fast upgrade cycle.
None of these are Internet Explorer, the problem in question. Chrome and its Play Store dependencies are backwards compatible to much older phones. Android browsers even years ago had better web platform support than IE11.
I fully sympathize and believe that web sites should be as compatible as possible. It's the web apps that fall apart once you take away modern functionality.
> In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice.
This really depends on how much their actual lives depend on being able to use the web. If they live in poverty and/or third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the web? What part of their life depends on what site exactly? Sure, communication is relevant, but we're already saying they have smart phones and thus data connections, email, and whatever native chat apps.
I'm not saying we should leave them behind technologically or that they don't matter or shouldn't have access to more information or knowledge, I'm just simply being practical with what is likely the real impact to their life.
In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content. The web already excels at that. Servers cache. Browsers cache. We don't need Vue to render a blog or article. Please leave such tech for SPAs and "apps" rather than sites or pages.
It won't affect their daily lives directly, but being able to access the knowledge scattered around the web is very important to human development in general.
What I wrote above is a kind of slippery slope argument, but it's a slope that I'm sure we're sliding down very quickly. You can't even read a technical blog these days without loading a whole SPA framework. If we keep going down this path, it will legitimately begin to impact the ability of people with older devices to access any information at all apart from those delivered through a handful of walled garden apps.
> In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content.
Completely agreed!
Thankfully, with IE gone, the "lowest common denominator" is now pretty awesome.
I just wish we had that with email rendering engines.
Better is to stick with standards and make the browser makers implement them properly. Of course things aren't perfect still (Safari has a reputation for being slow on the uptake so you can't use the latest & greatest if you need to support those users, and it is best to avoid the bleeding edge anyway (at least sticking as far back as the oldest LTS release of common browsers)).
That's 87.86% of what users are using (per Wikimedia's stats). To support the 1.76% of IE users, it will require a disproportionate amount of work that could negatively impact other development that benefits many more people.
That's the reality: Development time is a zero-sum game. If you do this you aren't doing this other thing, and in this case we're talking about under 2% that likely should be discouraged from using it.
PS - And this coming from someone whose uses are primarily on IE11 still (see my other post in the thread). Just because I personally benefit from IE11 staying around a few more years, doesn't mean the entire web should bend to that. IE11 must die, we just cannot turn on a needle, and when Edge dropped support for Java Applets/Flash it forced tons of organizations into IE11 for many more years than they would have wanted.
Avoid the bleeding edge to support those held back at LTS versions of common browsers, or if you use new tricks make sure they don't make things unusable on older-but-LTS browsers. Whether you consider IE11 an LTS browser or not is a matter for you to decide (yes, as it will be getting security updates for some time still, or no as it is seven years old, not getting any feature/support updates, and support for it is deprecated by even its own manufacture's apps).
Support accessibility by not using fancy things for the sake of it, and if you do something fancy make at least a little effort to have things degrade gracefully for those with accessibility issues. A lot of sites/apps skip this step, but shouldn't.
Basically, IE11 didn't change with the web so it's really out there now. You can develop for Firefox and all the Webkit/Blink offshoots just fine, but IE holds you up.
I've been in front-end dev for about 15 years and I don't remember that. I remember developing web applications to work in browsers that led to a significant number of our business' conversions, and practicing progressive enhancement in general.
Dropping support for IE is the right thing to do at this point.
I am working on a few different apps right now and none of them are targeting IE. It's a huge time suck and just not worth doing at the expensive of improving other parts of the application.
but honestly, we've ALWAYS had these issues, you should've been there when we had to support IE on Mac
In the mid-90s, the internet was filled with pages that had "best viewed with Netscape Navigator" or "best viewed with Internet Explorer" icons. Twenty-five years later that mentality hasn't changed, and I don't think it ever will. It costs too much to target more than one or two browsers.