There’s a big, beautiful Internet out there, but Internet Explorer users are likely missing out on a lot of experiences that do not work in the legacy browser.
Internet Explorer 11 is the latest version of the popular web browser by Microsoft that was released in late 2013. With a rich history and great success within businesses, previous versions of the browser dominated the market for a couple of decades. However, the introduction of Edge, the growing popularity of other web browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox and advancements of web standards made Microsoft consider different ways to push businesses to improve their web applications and migrate to Microsoft Edge.
Internet Explorer is holding everyone back
Developers wants to focus their efforts on providing more features at a faster pace for most of our users, rather than spending time figuring out workarounds for a browser released in 2013. We also want to provide our users with great usability and performance, something which, unfortunately, is not possible in IE11 when using web components. Polyfills make web components work in outdated browsers, but they are not fast. Combined with IE11’s relatively slow JS engine, the result is far from great.
Reasons to drop IE-11 support for your site ?
Supporting IE11 requires significant effort. To give a few examples:
- IE11 does not support the JavaScript ES6 standard. Afterall, not everyone wants to use babel transpiler in their application.
- IE11 debugging is a nightmare for developers. Developers spend hours of effort only to debug simple issue in this browser. Even the best devs struggle to use IE debugger.
- New CSS features such as Grid is not supported.
According to the stats available only, only 1 in the hundred users uses Internet Explorer. Now when the popular sites like Linkedin, Github and twitter has stopped supporting IE, you should too do it for a better web.
It is slower than snail
IE not only decreases productivity for the developer but also increases the scope of cross browser testing making QA’s life harder.
Developer’s Life Matter
Developer happiness won’t be viewed as important to the bottom line by some business stakeholders. However, recruiting good engineers is notoriously difficult. Average tenure is low compared to other industries. Nothing can harm developer morale more than a day of IE debugging. In a survey of 76,118 developers conducted by Mozilla “Having to support specific browsers (e.g. IE11)” was ranked as the most frustrating thing in web development. “Avoiding or removing a feature that doesn’t work across browsers” came third while testing across different browsers reached fourth place. By minimising these frustrations, deciding to end support for IE can help with engineer recruitment and retainment.
So, when do you plan to drop support for IE-11 ? Do let us know in comments.
