Hasty Treat - Should You Support IE11?

Welcome to Syntax. In this Monday, hasty treat. We're gonna be talking about everybody's favorite subject in the entire world, which is Internet Explorer 11.

Oh, yeah. Love me some Internet Explorer 11 JS something that you will never hear anybody say ever. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me, as always, is the Wes.

Hey, everybody.

Hey, everybody.

So how's it going in that full stack shack over there, Wes? Going good. I talked about last episode. My Internet is not great right now,

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Alright.

Internet Explorer.

It is a thing. Internet Explorer definitely is a thing. It's definitely a browser that people use, and, that's really my thoughts on Internet Explorer. That's it. It just exists.

Yeah. I so I launched my website the other day, and I was talking about how awesome it is that I didn't spend a whole lot of time doing cross browser testing.

And I was just saying, like, the web is pretty good right now. Pretty good.

And, of course, people don't like that when you say something good about the web. And I got a lot of replies being like, well, like, what about IE 11? And and I said, like, I'm not supporting IE 11. And then I got just blasted with all kinds of unsolicited opinions of whether you should or shouldn't support IE11.

So I thought, Wes just record a quick podcast about should you support IE11? Because they're like, I I don't know. As developers, we love to sit around and say, oh, IE sucks. Like, who uses IE? But at the end of the day, there are lots of metrics and ways you can decide if you should fully or partially support IE 11. And we'll also talk about, like, what are the features you can start using if you don't need to support I eleven. So some of you might already be on that train where you can drop I eleven. So I eleven was made let's see. When was it? 1800.

October 17, 2013. So almost 7 years ago, IE 11 was Node.

And that is a long, long time ago. There's a lot has happened in the web since then, which is kind of frustrating.

It will be deprecated at some point.

Let's see when I eleven comes with Windows 10 and the end of life for Windows 10 is October 14, 2025

Mhmm.

Which is kinda interesting.

Let me make sure that is correct.

I can't find a specific date. There seems to be stuff all over the place. But the reality is is that support for IE 11 and people actually using IE 11 is waning, and that's really exciting for us developers because there's a lot of things, that we can start to use. And there's a lot I think that once we finally drop IE11, we're going to be moving a whole lot faster. So currently, as of caniuse.com, it says that I eleven is 1.44% global usage.

But I I think you should probably never use those numbers as Yeah. Whether you should or shouldn't support it because you should be looking at your own numbers of as to to whether you should or shouldn't. So let's talk about that real quick. It's like, how do you make a decision whether you should or shouldn't support I eleven? I think you need to go into 2 big analytics, and that is how many people are visiting your website currently that are in I eleven and, b, probably more importantly, how many people are giving your company money in I eleven? Because at the end of the day, if Yeah. Right. Let's say you get a 2% drop in sales because you stopped supporting IE 11, in almost no world will you get approval for that. Because if the money's coming in, who cares what browser they're using at the at the end of the day? I personally had to make sure that my course platform, not absolutely everything, but the buying and the distributing of the courses had to work in I eleven.

But for my most recent website, Wes, I just don't support I eleven. I opened it up in I eleven, and it's awful. Like, the thing doesn't work because I don't have polyfills for this stuff, and none of the layout works because I'm using Flexbox and grid.

And I'm okay with that because it's like 0.06% I. E. 11 usage that comes to my website. And I've made the decision that people aren't giving me money to this type of thing, and it's not worth my time even, like, there's probably be people screaming at me right now being like, Wes, just, just give a, a lesser website, which we'll talk about in a second. But that is not worth my time either. I've totally dropped it. It's not worth it. Node. Yeah. For me, I've decided not to, but you, as a developer, should put aside any snarky comments you have and thought and hatred towards IE and just take a raw look at sales, money coming in, or just raw usage statistics that are are coming to your website?

I do too much gesticulating. I was doing a a tutorial, and I kept trying to say this word. And every time I said this word, I did this hand thing and knocked my microphone. I was like, oh, god. I gotta stop doing that. Okay.

So, yeah, I think that's essential. It's funny because I run a a business, right, as Wes, and I made the decision to not support IE 11 from day 1 specifically because, you know, the people who are using our application are inherently not going to be IE 11 users.

Those of you who are looking at making modern web applications, what we're not really appealing to, Vercel of tutorials JS certainly not appealing to the person who's never touched code in their entire life. Like, we have tons of free YouTube channels for or YouTube videos available for that kind of thing, But our our platform is largely for people who have experience with code and are looking to learn new things. So those people are are very unlikely to use IE 11, and the only people who open my application up on IE 11 are people who aren't my customers, which is, you know, it's important. It's funny. I was at the the bank, and the account associate who JS helping me with my account was like, oh, let me see your website. And she popped it open, and it looked like total garbage. And I was just like, I swear I'm legitimate. I just don't you aren't my customer. So, like, if you if you were to open this on your phone, this would look fantastic. You know? But I I've made all those decisions based on actual data that I have. Well, had I no longer do Google Analytics at all. But I when I used to do Google Analytics, I used to look at it and just say, why would I spend the time to do this? What's it giving me? And the cost to value proposition for me just wasn't there. And so that is educated decision. It wasn't just a decision based out of OIE sucks, which it does, but, you know, I don't wanna make decisions that way. And then for the most part, I think that's largely the like, if you aren't the decision maker in your organization and you're looking to convince people who are the decision makers, then you need to hit them up with raw data other than IE sucks because they're just gonna look at you like you're lazy if that's your platform. If your platform is, I just don't wanna deal with this, then they're gonna say tough stuff. You gotta deal with it. But if you say, listen. This is going to be a 0% cut to our bottom line. We have nobody using the site actively on it this way. It spends I spend this much amount of money, so we're technically at, like, a net negative in this situation.

Then you can look at your stakeholders and and show them exactly what the weight of that decision really is. Let's talk about, like, once you do drop IE 11, what features can you start using without having to go back and code a secondary version? And probably the biggest ones for me are modern Flexbox. So there is a Mhmm. Somewhat supported version of Flexbox in IE 11, that you can just use. What does that auto prefixer to kick out? And it doesn't have all the features, but it's it's good enough in in most cases.

CSS Grid Deno support, and CSS Grid doesn't you can't polyfill or or anything like that. There's no libraries out there that will will do that. So you just can't use CSS grid until you drop IE 11. And then things like CSS variables, you could certainly run a auto prefixer through that and just have static variables and then have the CSS variable after.

Yeah. They're really not great, the fallbacks for variables.

They're not? Oh, but, like, I'm thinking, like, you have, like, black, and just use something that would output color black and then output again after that color Yarn dash dash black. Sure. And then that will give you live variables and browsers that support it. And I think that's what you should be doing in in most of these things Wes you can make it work kind of or make it work good enough in these browsers.

Sometimes you can just ship a little bit of extra code to do that.

What else? You can partially support I eleven, so, like, major features can. Like, I could actually, that already works. Can already read the blog posts in I eleven. It's just the nav and and the footer and some of the image loading stuff doesn't totally work, which is okay.

You can use progressive enhancement where only modern browsers get the progressive enhancement is this idea. So you have a baseline and then you add the the fancy stuff in newer browsers or graceful degradation where you have your application, and then maybe you just have, like, a 1 column layout that you feed to IE11.

And then there's simple things just like polyfills Wes if a array method doesn't exist in IE 11, then you can just polyfill it, and it will add that to the array prototype Sanity will work in in in IE 11.

Mhmm.

Yeah. What about testing? Let's talk about this situation. You are a 1 person or a couple people shop. You only have Mac computers.

What's your strategy for testing I eleven or making sure that it works?

Yeah. I use VirtualBox.

And if you go to modern.ie, you can download a 7 gig image of a Windows machine, and it comes preloaded both with Microsoft Edge and the version of Microsoft Edge that is not yet Chromium. So that's kind of important for some people. And then it also comes with IE 11, and it's free. There's certainly browser stack and lots of services out there that will allow you to log in, but VirtualBox is free as long as you got, like, 15 gigs of free space on your computer. I've used that more often just for random stuff that only works on Windows.

Just fire up that. I also have a service book that has I eleven loaded on it as well. So sometimes I'll just open that up and and double check a couple of things. Yeah. Those are all peak strategies.

I just remember back when I worked in the agency, and we still had to test for IE 7, believe it or not, when I first started working. Yeah. We had this, like, CRT Windows computer that you had to turn on every single time you had to. And it's like, alright. I'm gonna have to test Windows today at some point. So I'm just gonna start turning this computer on right now, and then I'll come back to it in, like, an hour, and it'll be ready to go. It's like such a process. I just remember that so vividly of, like, this is the IE machine, and we test all the IE browsers on this. And we have them all loaded, and it was just such a giant pain in the in the butt. So things have changed definitely this VirtualBox.

It's amazing that they just give you those, you know, here have these. We know we know that you you need to test for it, so we'll make it as easy as we can on you, at least. And I would do that before paying for a service myself, but, you know, time is money and those kind of things as well. So Yeah. Download it now because, like, when you need it, your Internet JS gonna be slow, and downloading a 7 gig image takes a while. They used to even have versions of, like, all the way back to IE 6. I don't see that they offer those anymore. I'm sure you could dig them up. Another little tip of the virtual box is when you have it open, make sure you take a snapshot of the 1st day because it's only good for 30 days, and then you have to redownload or reinstall the image. But if you take a snapshot of the clean image, then you can always revert back to that snapshot every 30 days if you need to. Yeah. VirtualBox makes that pretty easy. VirtualBox is pretty rare that it exists at all, to be honest.

Yeah. It's unreal that they can do like, people are even running, like, OS X on Windows like a Hackintosh. But instead of installing it Mhmm. They're running it in a VM. And, apparently, you only give up 1 CPU core to do that. Oh. Yeah. I wonder how that yeah. I wonder how that goes. Yeah. And then you can use, like, an AMD processor for it. Mhmm. Nifty.

So that's it. Should you support I eleven? Well, do your homework. Stop complaining on the Internet and, and make a wise, informed decision.

That's such a good Wes. Can you we we just end every episode with do your homework, stop complaining on the Internet, and make a wise, informed decision. That to me just is like every single decision you need to make about any of this stuff. Should I tweet that React is bad because, some React developer hurt my feelings at some point? No. Maybe you should just not do that, and you should learn a little bit about it.

Oh, that's good. That's good. Alright. That's it for today. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we will catch you on Wednesday.

Peace. Peace.

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