I feel like it's going pretty fast. Do Google or Facebook even officially support IE8 anymore? I think the quicker the issue is forced the better it is for everyone. IE9 is at the very least pretty acceptable to deal with.
Does that 20% come from your own stats or a third party? Most of the third parties look at worldwide market share. IE8 is disproportionately represented in third-world countries which you may or may not care about in your business.
Best I can tell IE8 is somewhere around 6% in the US (these numbers are rough to find because most of the places that collect statistically significant numbers charge for the info). On my site (which centers around a first-world disposable-income-heavy hobby) IE8 is basically non-existent. Your mileage may vary.
On my largest site with a couple million visitors a month, IE makes up about 16% of site visitors. About 25% of those are using IE8. So, about 4% overall. I specifically ensure that the site still works in IE8 and up and was still quite functional on IE7 when I last looked.
Anyone not ensuring their site works on IE is leaving money and customers on the table. Note that it doesn't have to look exactly the same, but it should still work and allow customers to learn, buy, sign in, subscribe, etc.
It depends on your market. I've worked on apps that have never even seen a visitor using internet explorer at all. This happens all the time in b2c software. So that analogy of leaving money on the table is not very realistic.
Of course, it varies. But there are far more users of desktop IE than desktop Safari in the US, for instance. So, once your product spreads beyond early adopters, iPhone users and Mac users (all of which are the minority of the market by large margins in each case) it's important that your site already works with the new visitors as word spreads.
It's not just early adopters vs late adopters. And nobody is saying to disregard all of IE, only very old versions.
We're talking about dropping support for a browser that is mostly used on a thirteen year old operating system that even Microsoft has dropped support for.
My site is unlikely to ever have a significant number of IE8 users. It revolves around a nerdy hobby that people easily spend $500/year on, often in big chunks. They aren't letting their tech get that out of date.
I fully admit that this isn't every market, but you absolutely CAN make decisions about your specific market and decide that IE8 just simply is not and never will be worth it.
On the other hand, there are certain markets that will probably have to worry about IE8 for ten more years.
Gmail is part of Google Apps. That's pretty mainstream. Personally, where I work, anyone using any version of IE is screwed. We don't test for IE. I haven't checked to make things worked in IE as a regular part of development since 2009 and I have worked at a pretty big company that is often talked about on HN.
A few years back I was working on an app with some moderately fancy CSS and JS. We desperately wanted to drop IE6 support but after we pulled the revenue numbers per browser, we worked out our IE6 users could pay for a junior-mid range developer to just sit there and fix IE bugs all day.
I wonder what that's doing to the maintainability of your code base. I'm sure the overall cost is higher than just the pay of a single developer ruining your architecture. Supporting IE6 is more than just about fixing bugs.
Also, something to possibly consider: reach out to customers and ask them how much they need IE6 support. Unless it's healthcare or government, I'm not sure why anyone would use IE6 by choice. Would deprecating support for IE6 lose every single one of those customers?
A big chunk of the old IE users were military people deployed in the Middle East. I'm of the understanding that they have/had some sort of Internet Cafe setup on base, and I guess they were running older browsers.
And what happens when the amount of your users drops slightly or that hired dev is now worth more money? And what about the other costs on complexity in your codebase? I think the revenue needs to far eclipse one dev's salary to justify keeping IE6 support.
I believe (but cannot prove) that the 20% is mostly due to China. Because it's such an incredibly populous nation, it can dominate international statistics like these.
Unfortunately my home nation (though very small) is also on something like 20% WinXP (thus limited to IE8). It's ridiculous, but as long as clients are willing to pay us to support IE8, then that's what we'll do, much as we hate it. In my country it hopefully won't be long before it becomes prohobitively expensive to support IE8, so there's that... :)
How long should the mountain wait for Muhammad, though?
In the UK, analogue terrestrial television was eventually turned off, and replaced by digital, following a lengthy publicity campaign.
I would guess there are very few people staring at blank TV screens and wondering what to do now. My point is, you need to give people a push sometimes.
Anti-virus companies use an IE8 user agent string sometimes for finding dangerous sites.
Other bots and crawlers still use the IE8 string, although it seems like many are switching to Chrome.
I've never been able to find a resource about this, but is there any data available for the breakdown of bots/crawlers and their effect on browser usage statistics?
One reason I ask is that using the web with IE8 is pretty miserable and a lot of sites are flat out broken. I know there is an aspect of corporate networks on it, but 20% just seems really high if you realize that 20% or more of the web is broken for IE8 users.
Bootstrap 3 still supports IE8. You can still use Bootstrap 3, or even Bootstrap 2.
But it makes little sense to develop new tools that support IE8 at this point. By the time Bootstrap 4 is released (probably many months from now), IE8 usage will be even lower.
Further, since it's solely responsible for so many edge cases, polyfills, and hacks, it doesn't hurt to gently push for its demise. Even Microsoft is trying.
Well why in the name of all good design did Microsoft not put out a version of IE9 for Windows XP while it was still supported? That would made everything so much simpler, including for them -- after all, they have to worry about IE8 just like the rest of us, XP or no.
Jesus, I don't mean for me. I haven't touched XP in years, and have very rarely used any Windows OS for the past 5-6 years.
But there are millions of people in developing countries who can't afford to upgrade, or don't know how. Have you considered that? This is not a first-world problem.
Why not accommodate those users? MS doesn't have to support the OS itself, but think of how much trouble it could save developers around the world -- inside of Microsoft and out -- if all these XP machines were automatically upgraded to IE9.
Uh, when was the last time you saw XP on a new machine - from Google Analytics on a UK retail site I'm getting 2.4% of users on XP this month, equivalent month in 2013 was 6.5%, in 2012 was 12.4%, in 2011 21%, 2010 34% - that's basically halving each year for the last 3 years.
Yeah, this is because your users are mostly in the U.S. or Western Europe. It's a different story elsewhere in the world (although even those countries are slowly moving off of XP).
There's an informative talk by Alice Bartlett, a front-end developer at gov.uk (the UK government digital service) on Youtube. In the presentation, she states that two of the requirements for gov.uk are
1. Functional without Javascript
2. Functional in IE7+
The essential point made is that for much of gov.uk, it isn't that difficult to make the site work without Javascript or work in IE7 either.
Purley personal opinion, but web design has become incredibly bloated with so much cruft added to web pages - be it unnecesary Javascript or excess CSS. Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.
Heavy use of client side methods seems to break a lot of the benefits of using web apps in the first place. A main advantage of web apps originally was that they worked more or less the same on any machine. That Google Maps worked in exactly the same way regardless of how good your machine was at vector rendering. I wonder if the aversion to maintaining state on the server needs to end. You could do almost anything that a modern web app does with minimal client side code and have performance on low end PCs.
Consider that Bootstrap 3 isn't going away if you need IE8 support, and plenty of sites would be comfortable with that restriction. (Eg, all sites that use <canvas> in a non-fallback-able way)
> Do you expect IE8 browser share to change significantly in the next couple of months?
IE8 implies XP. XP is now actively nagging users about how dead it is every time they boot. The holidays are coming up. It is not unreasonable to expect some people to replace their prehistoric computers around the end of the year.
IE8 is under 4% now globally. Unless your customers are primarily large enterprise shops that's probably a reasonable trade-off even now, much less by the time Bootstrap 4 is actually released.
ALL Developers want to drop support for IE8. Has anyone had fun developing a site for IE8?
Business owners looking to make profit anyway they can DO NOT.
We do A/B testing for very small % gains yet we are ok with delivering a site that wont work in IE8? It is a hard business case to make with clients.
I'm glad the framework is moving forward, we all like playing with new toys, but I hope there is an IE css file that will "fix it enough" to make it work for IE8
If you can convince the 10% of Australia's population to stop using IE8, then I'd be happy to. As it stands, where I work charges a lot more for IE8 support, but most places are happy to pay it :(
The statement may be more to test the waters than to state a hard and fast condition of Bootstrap 4. Also, it's not like someone can't just use the 3 series. For our internal app, we're still using Bootstrap 2.
It's a 5 year old browser. The only operating system stuck on IE8 is Windows XP, a 13 year old operating system. I have a feeling that anyone still using it won't take much notice of things being a little broken.
I disagree. The company I work for provides software to schools and school districts, which tend to be pretty far behind the technological curve. After analyzing our usage patterns, we were able to drop IE8 recently.
If you're using IE8 still, you're probably pretty used to a broken web. For most purposes, I think developing for IE8 should basically be making sure your very basic content and functionality is available in some form. But I think it's ridiculous at this point in the game to be aiming for 100% compatibility. If someone cares enough, they'll upgrade.
Not really. The only people who still need to support ie8 are in enterprise and the enterprise is usually a couple years behind. By the time they upgrade to bootstrap 4 ie8 support will have ended.
My product's client base is 9% IE7 and 60% IE8. Mainly hospitals and .gov agencies use our system. It's getting really hard to even test with those browsers let alone find frameworks that will work for our client base and we can't even force them off, because "IT says we can't install anything because it's insecure." AH!
It's pretty bad. We once got a ticket to make sure our app works with "ALL BROWSERS" because it was broken in IE6. That ticket was 6 months ago. The users are out there.
On highly trafficked sites , IE 8.0 usage can account for a fair amount of users, and conversions etc. It's a tougher decision to make to take those users off the table.
I won't work anywhere that cares about IE. If you are a company that wants to support IE and have competent, professional engineers I hope you pay a high salary.
This is such a stultifyingly stupid attitude it's hard to know where to begin, or to understand how you can be effective as a developer.
Let's be clear – if you develop a service on the web, and a significant proportion of the users or target market uses IE8—enough that there's a positive ROI—then you are making a poor business decision by refusing to support it.
If you have significant resistance to upgrading from Windows XP or IE8, then you need to charge more for your product. Let's face it, maintaining websites on older browsers that have poor standards support is expensive.
I maintain such a web application myself. I work primarily on OS/X as my main development machine, and run various windows versions in virtual box in order to test these older browsers. Since the feature is usually completed using modern browsers up-front, there almost always a QA glitch that has to get worked out on IE8, chewing up another 20-30% of the total time of the project. Time that costs everyone in the business time, energy and pain. Think about that; 30% of the cost of development to support < 3% of the users.
When the large web companies like Google and Facebook remove support for these legacy browsers, every web developer on Earth cheers. Every instance of IE8 that is snuffed from existence is more time we can spend on creating great software features, and not wasting time back-porting.
I'm doing just fine as a developer. What you think is a stupid attitude is shared by pretty much everyone I work with, and others as well. From managers down to individual engineers. It's an attitude shared by many startups too in the bay area. People are either developing mobile apps for iOS or Android, or web apps for Chrome and Firefox, and probably Safari if they care about mobile.
IE updates come in too slow, longer than once a year - it's been a year since IE 11, and IE 12 is not even on the near horizon. Chrome and Firefox have had how many updates since then? Even Safari has updated in that time. Windows 10 is slated for release after April 2015, that's a year and a half since their browser has been updated!
IE selectively implements standards for business reasons and IE has a history of versions sticking around for long periods of time.
IE's developer tools, even in IE 11 are horrible. They're not even a shade of what webkit, blink and mozilla based browsers offer.
Finally, and the most damning of reasons: you need to have a Windows machine or a slow and painful (and expensive) virtualization service to test IE if you don't use Windows to develop. We all use macs, if someone isn't using a mac they're more than likely using some linux distro. I haven't worked with a developer that used Windows as their main development machines in 5 years, and in that case they were actually developing a windows application.
IE doesn't deserve our attention, users can install a different browser or deal with it, but I haven't heard a user complain about it, at all. Once in a long while someone might ask, sheepishly, and not make a big fuss about it when we tell them that we don't really support IE.
I worked in an environment like that a few years ago on an internal SPA. IE6 was so bad in terms of memory leaks, the app was unusable in IE6 after a few hours. Many people were using Firefox standalone for our app (among others) just to be able to keep things open all day.
Dropped support for IE8
That seems pretty premature.