While IE11 as an independent program is going away, the rendering engine is still around for 8+y.
Here's hoping that this deprecation removes the expectation that things support IE11, however!
Microsoft has a long reputation of fixing bugs caused by other people's software and their incorrect assumptions about Windows.
There are also timelapses for those not into having a multi-hour windows nostalgia marathon.
Follow up - Windows 1 to Windows 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH1BKPSGcxQ
It's not just about doing something new; a bad codebase that I don't have the opportunity to genuinely improve is probably the most miserable type of project I can possibly think of
Good software engineering is all about building something that meets current business needs while being flexible enough to adapt to future needs. When you lose this flexibility, you need to refactor or changes become too difficult to implement.
IE11 isn’t getting any new features. It’s in maintenance mode. Cleaning up the code in major ways at this point would be a waste of time.
Realistically it'll just be part of a far larger security team that fixes bugs in a large number of software preferably prioritising bugs based on severity where there's always going to be something better to do than mess with old codebases.
That being said, our company is deprecating IE11 support in October and I already have the PRs ready to rip out some of the code that bloats our JS/CSS with polyfills.
Anything new can safely ignore IE11, because Edge won't be using the IE11 engine for it.
This is great, because it'll get corporations to replace the actual IE11 executable with the Edge executable.
I’m probably just cynical, but nothing caused corporations to get rid of IE11 before, and nothing will now.
Working on an enterprise b2b web app, I’m going to have to support IE11 indefinitely.
Yes it will. Microsoft is gradually pulling out all support for it, with this year being the big start of that.
Very soon, it'll become more work for admins to maintain IE11 installations than it will be for them to migrate to Edge with IE11 compatibility mode. Admins tend to choose the path of least work.
You're only going to need to support IE11 indefinitely if your enterprise app requires IE11. Otherwise, your company is probably going to be able to pull the plug at some point in the next 2 years, depending on your specific customer base.
You can even disable the ability for users to change it, forcing IE mode on sites where it doesn’t work.
It’s my second most hated abuse of group policy.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/ie_standards/ms-i...
Luckily it only to last another year or so before we replace this product. Some people don't understand the cost and effort required to replace some of these older but hugely important legacy products.
Always sounds good in theory but when trying to maximise reach, it can be hard to instantly tell a whole bunch of the web, who might be running old PCs, that they can't use your site any more.
Also, when you have large corporate customers, you often do not have enough muscle to tell them that unless they upgrade their client browsers, they can no longer use your service.
That decision might sound simple but there can be loads of regulatory or accreditation hurdles to overcome to use a new browser and it can affect 1000s of corporate employees.