
Ask HN: Is it ok to drop IE11 support for SaaS product? - jancio
We are spending a fair amount of time testing a debugging weird issues with IE 11. Do you think it is ok to simply drop the support since most of our users are engineers and analytics show pretty much zero IE traffic? Have you faced a similar decision recently?
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vlucas
Always look at your traffic logs before making this kind of decision, but
global usage is at 2.3%: [https://caniuse.com/usage-
table](https://caniuse.com/usage-table)

I personally have dropped it for most of the apps I make (especially mobile
web apps) so I can drastically reduce the final JavaScript bundle size by not
having to polyfill a bunch of crap that all modern browsers already have
built-in (Promises, fetch, fat arrow functions, let, const, etc.).

~~~
neuroticfish
Definitely analyze traffic logs. Global usage may be 2.3% but if OP's product
demographic overlaps with IE11's (most likely elderly folks) then dropping
IE11 support could be costly.

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sauldcosta
If your analytics show almost no usage and you're not required to by any SLAs
or similar, I'd say go for it. We did recently and it's definitely reduced the
mental overhead in our development process.

Our official SLA now is to support the current version and one prior for
Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. We also don't support any version
that is no longer receiving functionality updates.

The most important thing though is communication. If your site isn't going to
work well or at all on certain browsers, alert your users to this with a
popup. There are lots of libraries for doing user agent detection that makes
this trivial.

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ezekg
It totally depends on who your target market is and what type of device they
use.

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troycarlson
If you have the time/resources, show those users a message urging them to
upgrade and provide links to newer versions. Then monitor traffic levels to
see if usage declines to an acceptable level. Depending on the volume of
remaining traffic you get, you may be able to contact those users and figure
out why they haven't upgraded.

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lastofus
Assuming your product is live, you should have hard analytic data to support
your decision making one way or the other. If you don't have browser stats,
your first step is installing google analytics or a similar offering (or just
crawling your server logs).

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andrei_says_
Yes unless your potential clients are in government, medical, insurance or
financial industries.

Locked windows workstations, OS are frozen on Win7 For as long as possible.

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kypro
Perhaps controversial here, but in general, I've found developers who are
having a hard time supporting browsers like IE11 tend to be the ones writing
frontend code poorly.

JQuery is a great example of how you can create a library with some core
functionality and know with 100% certainty that if you use it correctly it
will work across all browsers that it was intended to support.

Whenever we have issues with browser support where I work it's almost always
because a dev has gone rogue and decided to build something with a heap of
vanilla JS instead of using or extending a library with cross browser support
in mind.

Perhaps you need to ask why you're having so many issues when so many
libraries and frameworks will support IE11 out-of-the box if you use them
correctly.

~~~
Chyzwar
> JQuery is a great example of how you can create a library with some core
> functionality and know with 100% certainty that if you use it correctly it
> will work across all browsers that it was intended to support.

Maybe 5 years ago. You cannot use modern JS and CSS in IE11, you need to use
transpilers, polyfills and pray to god that all your dependencies are
compatible. Testing and debugging is IE is slow and painful.

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gitgud
> analytics show pretty much zero IE traffic...

Is anyone begging for it? Your users problems are the problems to focus on. If
it's not a problem for them, then it's not a problem for you

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gtirloni
_> analytics show pretty much zero IE traffic_

That's your clue. Go for it.

~~~
quickthrower2
A IE banner telling them to upgrade to Firefox would be a good idea.

~~~
andrei_says_
Most corporate workstations are locked.

