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Comment by leipert | Hacker News Reader

Same thing happened at GitLab when we dropped IE11 support last May. No pushback or feedback from users at all: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/197987

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The trick to minimising negative comment is ensuring your feedback form doesn't work in IE11 either.

They learn from the best: a certain “open-source project to help move the web forward” has a bug tracker that simply doesn't load anything without Javascript, or in incompatible browsers.

It is funny how “moving forward” without brakes tacitly demands that others must clear the path and lay the tracks in order to prevent crashes.

Salesforce went down the other day, our Salesforce based customer portal was down. So was the case management system customers use to lodge issues.

Yep -- I thank those who fought that battle back in 2017-2019, as by time we got around to it, it was nothing. I bet we spent more time talking about if we should do it, when, and messaging than our support team has dealt with customers trying to use IE11.

It still comes up, we had a question this week from an IE11 user, and they just let them know to use another browser and they always do.

There is no fight left in the IE11 user base.

Hopefully with Microsoft's aggressive updating policies in Win10 old Edge will be killed off soon. We'll be sitting pretty when it comes to web standards. Safari lags behind but not by much.

In our team, every time there was a bug in Safari, it was something awfully wrong in our code that just happened to work on Chrome/FF for mysterious reasons. I never had a problem on Safari with standard quality code.

This is being far too kind to Safari. They were the ones who unilaterally decided that 7 days is sufficient time to clear out localStorage and IndexedDB.

Additionally, found this recent post going into why Safari is hot garbage. https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/

While the File System Access API is still being developed, I'm not holding my breath for it to appear on iOS. To be fair, it isn't supported yet on mobile Chrome (for Android obviously), but I expect it will be added quickly after the v1 of the API is finalized. I expect it will either never appear on iOS or it will take 5+ years from now...

HTML5 date and time inputs still don't work on Safari tho.

Safari 14.1 for desktop looks to be getting closer. Same for 14.5 on mobile.

https://caniuse.com/?search=Date

Why is it that iOS Safari was the first to support date inputs back in 2007, but desktop Safari, using the same engine, still doesn’t support it some 14 years later?

> We'll be sitting pretty when it comes to web standards.

You'll be sitting pretty on standards, or you'll be able to just target Chrome and forget about standards?

Exactly, what a ridiculous statement from GP. Now it seems like the web might end up in webgl canvases anyways

Apple should ditch WebKit and adopt Gecko. Mozilla could use the funding. and the two organizations share similar philosophies on user privacy. It would also deal a significant blow to the growing Blink monoculture.

According to the book “Creative Selection” (by one of the original Safari devs). They tried with Gecko first, but the POC didn’t went far: the build system at that time was messy and they couldn’t get it work. So they switched to KHTML, because of the nice code base. That internal fork evolved to WebKit.

I remember peeking around the Gecko codebase when Firefox got popular - and yeah, it was pretty gnarly. I remember seeing related .cpp files in the same directory using different naming conventions, for example.

I’m told Gecko is a lot better now though.

By that logic Firefox should drop gecko and adopt WebKit. It’s already maintained by a megacorp and isn’t blink.

WebKit is close enough to Blink that this move would be bad for the ecosystem as a whole. More variety in web technology implementations makes it harder for any one approach to dictate the standards going forwards.

So glad you agree that having both WebKit and gecko remain active is a positive.

Why should they? WebKit was developed by Apple, and is deeply integrated in the OS.

It was originally developed as part of KDE (KHTML), although Apple have obviously done a lot with it since.

Yup, it’s a fork of KHTML, much like Blink is a fork of Webkit.

One thing that WebKit does better than other browsers on OSX is hooking into the native rendering APIs. That’s something that Firefox does a shoddy job at.

Apple probably has no interest in throwing good money after bad, with regards to security work involved in making that feasible.

The major difference was MS aggressively pushing against IE11.

It really gives management no opportunity to stand still on this anymore.

Heh, ya, same deal where I work. Dropped support I think two years ago now. Anyone who asks doesn't complain when they are told to use a different browser.

Gitlab may not be the best example of potential pushback because the userbase is largely technologists. With this particular group, deprecating IE11 support is "preaching to the choir".

I think you are right on one hand, on the other hand I expected certain customers to have IE11 support as a requirement on paper.

Probably after the WannaCry shitshow people stopped trying to hang on to legacy exploitable Operating Systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack

If the $1,000,000 specialist machine you absolutely rely on needs XP or 9x, which is very often the case in medical or industrial scenarios, that's not an option. What you _can_ do is use an alternative to the built-in (un-updateable) browser: although you won't be able to get the most up-to-date version of any alternative browser, it's still way better.

If that's the case, I would argue you should only use that specialized machine for specialized needs and have a more modern system for regular internet usage. Firewall the specialized hardware from any non-whitelisted sites / network addresses with extreme prejudice. Why risk a million dollar system to open a funny email with cat pictures, oh no its a virus.

Your highly important specialist machine is probably remotely exploitable for as much damage as replacement cost if it also needs a web browser and an internet connection.

Also a browser that is years behind current has a trail of breadcrumbs in terms of fixed bugs for newer versions. It is probably nearly as bad as the built-in option.

> Your highly important specialist machine is probably remotely exploitable for as much damage as replacement cost if it also needs a web browser and an internet connection.

Correct. Those versions of Windows will not bet getting any crucial or critical updates.

You're better off trying to see if ReactOS / FreeDOS will run the damn thing.

The only reason for continued IE11 support is because it shipped with Window 10 and they guaranteed that core software would be updated for a lot of years.

Back in the day (2009ish), we dropped support for IE6 for all but a few sections of our website that were used by employees of financial institutions. Same story - chrome was just gaining popularity and it was an easy sell. We had this giant banner for IE6 users to download Firefox or Chrome. Saved us so much time in development and testing.

Oh, not for us. I think we dropped support in like 2012 our 13 ish and our clients lost their shit. So many of them would cite the fact that they had special activex plugins installed into IE which made them more "secure".

Dropping 8 was a lot easier to do and we probably could ditch 11 today without a fuss. But man were our clients attached to 6, it was nuts.

Urg... Even in 2012 IE6 was ancient. If I was doing freelance and a client wanted IE6 support, I'm pretty sure I'd quadruple my rate and let them know it will take ten times as long to complete. Fuck IE6.

I just looked it up because I wasn't sure how old it was...

...and damn. IE6 was released in 2001, and the last update was 2008.

By 2012, IE9 was the norm, and IE 10 came out late in the year. That's also around the time that Chrome started gaining significant market share.

Yeah, that was bad browser for a developer who wanted to code only by standards. But in the other hand, back then when IE6 was released - it was the best.

See my song from 2009, "IE is Being Mean to Me Again": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTTzwJsHpU8

Wow, I remember that one! :)

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