
Bootstrap v5: drop Internet Explorer support - zaiste
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/30377
======
7777fps
IE 11 is still supported by Microsoft because it is tied to Windows 10
support.

If you're B2C you can probably ignore that and just not support it, but if
you're B2B where you're selling not to users it's very hard to get away from
supporting IE11.

If your users never directly interact with you (for example you sell white-
label software which gets resold) then you just can't control your end-user
tech stack enough.

If you're selling to partners who sell to companies who push out logins to
their customers or user base then even if <1% of users use IE 11, that becomes
5% of companies having a user with it, which becomes 30% of the partners who
are asking for IE11 support.

It's one thing to turn down 1% of users it's quite another to annoy 30% of
your income stream.

As long as bootstrap 4 is supported (and the legacy bootstrap 3 support
suggests it will be) then this doesn't have to be a problem of course, just
one more thing to be aware of.

~~~
chatmasta
Doesn’t Microsoft advise against using IE11 because of security reasons,
except for critical internal applications that only support IE11? [0] It’s
mind blowing to me that companies continue to use an insecure browser, to the
point of insisting on it.

Why can’t vendors refuse to support IE11 on the grounds that it’s a security
risk? If you reframe the problem to “IE11 is insecure,” surely customers will
adapt?

[0] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-security-chief-ie-
is...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-security-chief-ie-is-not-a-
browser-so-stop-using-it-as-your-default/)

~~~
Kye
COBOL is still in use 61 years later. Institutional inertia is very much in
style. Vendors can't dictate terms to the people paying the bills.

~~~
chatmasta
They can if the software is good enough and the customer really wants it.

~~~
_ZeD_
not if the ones using the software are not the ones that pay

~~~
Dangeranger
If you are big enough, and people want to use your software enough, you can
dictate what you will support no matter who is paying.[0]

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/30/flash-
you...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/30/flash-youtube-
nostalgia)

------
tenebrisalietum
Microsoft (or a third party) needs to do this:

I. Rename IE11 something like "MS ActiveX Runtime For LOB Network Apps" (AXR
for short) or something like "MS ActiveX Player".

II. Create an MMC console entitled "AXR Domain Manager" that identifies a list
of domains that open in AXR instead of the default browser. This list is
controllable via group policy and other MS management tools.

III. Modify IE where if a website not in the aforementioned list is accessed,
a popup saying "This site will be opened in your default browser" appears and
the link opens up in the default browser.

It would make it so much easier to explain to non-technical people that IE11
is really a legacy app engine at this point and shouldn't be used for modern
website usage.

~~~
acdha
Isn't that basically what Enterprise Mode does?

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/deploy/emie-...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/deploy/emie-to-improve-compatibility)

> If you have specific websites and apps that have compatibility problems with
> Microsoft Edge, you can use the Enterprise Mode site list so that the
> websites open in Internet Explorer 11 automatically. Additionally, if you
> know that your intranet sites aren't going to work correctly with Microsoft
> Edge, you can set all intranet sites to automatically open using IE11 with
> the Send all intranet sites to IE group policy.

~~~
int_19h
I think the point is to do the reverse - if somebody does run IE11 directly
(rather than Edge), and tries to open a website that is not in the system-wide
whitelist, it forces them to use Edge.

------
0xff00ffee
There are still companies in Europe I work with that use IE11.

Since we switched from jQuery to Vue last year, we put a friendly reminder on
each page saying IE11 is not supported (since its ES6 support sucks), but the
tickets still came in. Finally we installed a header on all B2B sites that
pops a modal error saying please don't use IE11. The tickets stopped abruptly.
I was expecting complaints, but the majority of them already have alt browsers
installed, so instead of asking, in this case forcing them to use a different
browser worked much better.

~~~
e12e
Won't this be great when Google and everyone else kills off the user agent
header? 5 years from now, there'll be no forcing/detecting users with old
ipads, chromebooks or phones.

~~~
bepvte
You should reread that article

~~~
e12e
Hmm, valid point.

[https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-hints/](https://wicg.github.io/ua-client-
hints/)

------
darekkay
Even StackOverflow dropped IE11 support recently [1], mainly to be able to use
CSS custom properties in their Dark Theme implementation.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/31/building-dark-mode-
on-...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/31/building-dark-mode-on-stack-
overflow/)

~~~
aesyondu
It makes sense when we assume that StackOverflow's audience are those who know
enough not to use IE11.

------
fortyseven
I wonder how many of these ancient legacy systems are content to stay on IE
because everyone coddles them with support? Chicken and the egg kind of thing.
Why invest the time and money to modernize if devs will bend over backwards to
keep them on life support?

~~~
beart
More likely it's because no one wants to pay to upgrade the hundreds of barely
supported in-house apps their company has that only run on IE 11 in
compatibility mode.

~~~
karatestomp
The people making the decision judge their personal risk to be higher if they
initiate the change than if they stick with the status quo, even with the
chance that it causes a major breach—they might not get blamed for that,
anyway. Same as most business decisions.

------
mleland
I feel like the projects that rely on bootstrap are ones that have a larger IE
audience.

I hate supporting IE, but that has always been the appeal of bootstrap for me.

~~~
czechdeveloper
You can remain using older versions then.

But they can't really stay relevant and keep supporting IE.

~~~
tpetry
Why? Their plan for bootstrap v5 at the moment is just some cleanup to fix
mistakes they made and remove the jquery dependency. I dont see the reason for
these goals to not support ie11.

As much as i hate ie11 we have to still support it as its used in many
businesses using our softwares

~~~
thawaway1837
I think it makes sense to formally drop the IE dependency in versions sooner
than when you’re making changes that actually break IE.

Besides, replacing jquery May indeed be why they chose to drop IE right now.
One of the biggest selling points of jquery, and one of the biggest
contributors to its heaviness, is cross browser support including IE.

As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means
they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach.

~~~
uk_programmer
> As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means
> they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach.

Array.prototype.forEach is supported from IE9.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/forEach#Browser_compatibility)

EDIT: It is the nodelist api that isn't supported in IE. Not
Array.prototype.forEach.

Quite a lot of these basic JS constructs even if they are missing (most aren't
in IE11) are very easily polyfilled.

Personally I think it is fine that they drop support if they don't feel the
need to support it. Bootstrap 4 isn't going to vanish.

~~~
marcthe12
And if you can polyfill, that is good way to drop support for ie11. Personally
instead of support ie11 out of the box, have have create custom build or
expect them to do polyfilling themselves. This way they can optimize for the
remaining browsers.

------
baccredited
I have access to analytics for a big government site. 11% of all traffic in
March 2020 was IE11.

~~~
tzs
I have access to order processing logs from a small site whose customers use
Windows and who are generally not very technical.

Of people who actually order:

    
    
      36% Chrome
      26% Edge
      19% Firefox
      19% IE11

~~~
e12e
No problem. If you drop support for ie11, those stats become:

Of people who actually order:

    
    
      44% Chrome
      32% Edge
      23% Firefox
    

Unfortunately total orders will drop...

------
Raed667
The only reason we still "support" IE11 in my company is that a "significant"
number of our users visit us in their working-hours from IE11.

During the weekend this kind of traffic drops significantly, which means to me
that people using IE have to, and not choose to.

------
cfv
As a provider, supporting old tech stacks sucks. They're clunky, have all
kinds of warts and annoying workarounds for stuff that got improved in future
versions.

As a consumer, being told my light bulbs won't work with the new fixture is a
great reason to no longer work with that provider.

As a provider that knows this, I'd rather support the old tech stack right up
to the point my ability to keep the lights on isn't at risk.

------
Cthulhu_
Is it going to be completely broken / inoperable or just "not quite perfect"?

~~~
Etheryte
Reading through the changeset[1], this isn't a minor "some styles out of line"
update, they're removing a number of polyfills that were there to only serve
IE11 that affect many of their core components. Without testing it out, I
would expect most components that use Javascript for functional enhancements
to be broken. Most of the style changes are fairly minor and nothing you
couldn't fix as you go, but the script changes are breaking changes.

[1]
[https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/30377/files](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/30377/files)

------
jgalt212
IE 11 legacy support is a dream compared to having to support IE 8 and lower
back in the day. The JS engine on IE 9 was about 10X faster than the one on IE
8.

~~~
alkonaut
I remember thinking "Once IE6 is dead I'll never complain about browsers
again". IE11 is still pretty fantastic compared to IE6.

------
sjroot
I despise the fact that IE11 is still used, but it’s used by a quarter of our
users at the large company I work at.

We don’t use Bootstrap, but hopefully this encourages the companies that _do_
use it to usher their users to something more modern and secure.

~~~
mekkkkkk
Never underestimate an IT departments ability to not give a fuck. I once got a
bug report from a colleague complaining about our website not working in
Firefox. I couldn't reproduce it locally, so I got to her computer and
realized that Firefox updates (?!) had been blocked. Everyone in that
department was stuck on Firefox 12, when the current version was 60+. Turns
out that not even evergreen browsers are safe from overzealous policies.

And this was on a pretty big media company with a large digital footprint.

~~~
thoraway1010
At least govt side sometimes the staff either don't know or don't have a
budget so once something works they've learned to absolutely lock everything
down has hard as they can so it can't be messed up. This is partly because
vendors willing to deal with a govt procurement cycle often are selling total
junk (for high prices).

------
maelito
Don't forget the fact that some (how much ?) users visit websites with IE
because it's the default browser on their entreprise setup, but admins have
installed Firefox alongside for compatibility with modern websites.

So dropping IE is almost a service for them.

Source : french administration with thousands of employees.

------
drinchev
I'm even not sure what an average experience on IE11 would be for any users.

I push as much as I can to POs / stakeholders to just disable non-critical
features on IE11 and just leave the basic functionality.

I doubt anyone using IE11 likes that fact, so sounds good to give them just
another reason to complain about their experience to their superiors. I will
definitely never see "The product that just works on IE11" as a slogan, so
being competitive in this won't be reasonable argument.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Ha, my office's intranet is MS SharePoint, the menu is broken in Chrome. I
sent them the CSS to fix it (unnecessary divs are added, you just need the
right selector and you can display:none them all) ... worked fine in IE11,
apparently that's justification for a WONTFIX (fixed it for myself with
uBlock).

Lots of emails come around saying use/don't use IE11 for this operation
because half the time it doesn't work, and half the time the sites being
linked aren't standards compliant.

As an ex webdev it's hard not to be annoyed.

------
lazyjones
What are some good alternatives for developers who don't want to lose 2,39%
(or whatever the current MSIE11 market share is) of their visitors/revenue?

Bulma claims 90% compatibility with IE11 at least. Foundation 6 seems to
support IE9+.

~~~
StreamBright
Market share != revenue share.

~~~
reaperducer
_Market share != revenue share._

This can certainly be true.

The amount of revenue my company generates from IE11 users is at least an
order of magnitude more than its Chrome, Firefox, and Safari users combined.

------
rado
A progressively enhanced site should work fine in text mode on IE11.

~~~
toastal
Maybe for some CSS sure, but there's so much has happened in the realm of web
APIs and JavaScript that certain things are nearly impossible.

------
ativzzz
Why aren't IE users considered more when thinking about accessibility? The
best practice is to incorporate a11y accessibility standards to accommodate
the small percentage of users who use screen readers and/or have color
blindness/other disabilities. Why are we so quick to drop IE11 support when
supporting users with disabilities is just as much work if not more? And
possibly are a smaller percentage of users than IE users? You'll never read
"Bootstrap stops supporting screen readers and removes aria tags in v6".

By extension, can we classify IE usage as a disability? Only half joking: I
imagine a lot of current IE users are either doing it because of work or
because they are technologically illiterate.

~~~
bfred_it
Disability isn’t a choice

------
jmull
Well, this is a mistake.

Nobody likes to support IE11 but dropping support moves Bootstrap 5 from "just
use Bootstrap" to "Bootstrap has tricky pitfalls". Before someone can use
Bootstrap 5 they need to be sure and confident that they don't need IE11 and
never will.

~~~
_bxg1
IE11 was supplanted by Edge _years_ ago. Windows 10 ships with Edge
preinstalled (it comes with both, but you're not stuck with IE). Windows 7 and
older are no longer supported by MS. The only in-between is Windows 8 which
everyone hated so I doubt it has a huge market share, especially in
enterprises which are the only ones who might be "stuck" with the browsers
that come preinstalled on the OS.

~~~
jmull
That's fine, but irrelevant.

IE11 lives on because many corporations run software that requires it.

There's a network effect, because links don't open the a browser that's
compatible with the destination, but in the same browser as the link. So the
corp with one IE11 app wants to serve their intranet home page in IE11, and so
they want everything to run in IE11.

There are mitigations and migration paths, but that's all swimming up-stream
-- it incurs risk, and costs time and money -- so it happens slowly and only
in spots.

To use Bootstrap 5 you have to answer this question: are corporations my
customer, or could I ever pivot to a business strategy where corporations are
my customer?

If you don't care about money, then you can just answer no if you want, and
you'll be fine.

But the consumers you can reliably insist run modern browsers don't pay for
websites (not directly), so if you are running a business you are either
committed to an ad-driven model, physical goods model, with no b2b option, or
you're going to keep IE11 in-play.

I just don't think most people want to make a far-reaching commitment about
the nature of their future business before they develop their first web page.
(They do it all the time, but not on purpose!) A framework like bootstrap
should free you from coming to grips with all that, but bootstrap 5 pushes it
into your face before you are probably ready for it.

~~~
hombre_fatal
> To use Bootstrap 5 you have to answer this question: are corporations my
> customer, or could I ever pivot to a business strategy where corporations
> are my customer?

> If you don't care about money, then you can just answer no if you want, and
> you'll be fine.

You come off as weirdly bitter and hostile here.

Obviously when you choose tech, you have to weigh the pros and cons. It's part
of our job. Why is it not our job when picking the foundation framework for
our web client?

If you need IE11 support you can stay on Bootstrap 4 (we're still using
Bootstrap 3!) or any of the other CSS frameworks. What's the problem?

Also, most people aren't in a position where they might accidentally take on
corporate business in the future, either. Seems like a weird niche position to
hammer on. And if you were in that position yet you chose a framework that,
what, only works in Firefox unstable nightly, then you made a bad call and
maybe you'll learn from the decision. So what?

Seems like weak reasoning for Bootstrap to never push the envelope when there
is still Bootstrap 3 and 4 available. That's why they cut a new brand each
time instead of just bumping semver on the same Bootstrap product. Every major
version hop is basically a new framework.

~~~
wstuartcl
Are you really proposing that a new development today should choose to
implement bootstrap 3? ...

~~~
int_19h
They're proposing that new development today that _needs IE11 support_ (most
of them don't) should use Bootstrap 4. What's unreasonable about that?

------
k__
Somehow Bootstrap became the jQuery of CSS for me.

I used it excessively 6 years ago. Then the v4 took an eternity to release and
I already switched to different solutions.

I would have thought that people that are still using it are doing so because
of legacy support.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
Which solutions?

------
websitescenes
Good lord, looks like I’ll have to wait a few years to use this update then.
We have a decent amount of legacy browser users that need support. Wish that
Bootstrap supported these still widely used browsers. Had the same problem
with v4.

~~~
dangus
“Need” support, until you just force them to not need it.

Like how YouTube basically killed off IE6:
[https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-
in...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-internet-
explorer-6-kill-plot-engineer)

As long as people don’t have a reason to change, they won’t. I say you drop
support now and consider yourselves lucky that you can ditch your more
difficult and problematic customers.

I mean, of course, I know this isn’t a realistic course of action for
everyone. But I wish it was.

~~~
joshuaissac
It is usually the difficult and problematic enterprise customers using IE11
that also pay the most money. The choice between ditching customers and
ditching a framework is not usually difficult.

~~~
websitescenes
Agreed, keeping your customers supported is #1 priority. This is a super hard
lesson for many new engineers as they always want to use the latest and
greatest bleeding edge tech. Unfortunately that want rarely aligns with the
businesses needs.

------
vinniejames
This sounds like a terrible idea. Most of the reason to use a framework like
Bootstrap is to avoid dealing with cross browser issues, looking at you IE

------
tcd
It seems IE11 has become the new Python 2.7. I can only hope one day MS
decides to pull the plug entirely, it can't run any new JS features and is
clinging onto life.

Eventually, the web will just break (for example, http/3), and IE will be
forced to retire.

We just need the "right" pieces to break before it can retire in peace.

------
eddywebs
IE has become a tech debt that often corporations running an enterprise web
app older than 10 years have to bear. I have clients who's web applications
refuse to work on Chrome/Firefox and mandates the use of IE11 for proper
functioning.

------
soperj
FINALLY!

------
leejoramo
What is the the expected release date for Bootstrap 5.

Being that it is still an early Alpha, this change may not have a significant
impact for a while.

------
wnevets
I would love to drop IE11 support but its still generates way too much
revenue. V5 won't be an option until that changes.

------
lanius
Small world, the committer is one of the main contributors to MPC-HC (RIP)

------
jakearmitage
Are there any frameworks like this that support IE10 or IE11?

------
KarlKemp
Bootstrap needs a modern browser, but modern browsers don’t need bootstrap.

Seriously: 90% of the value of bootstrap was homogenizing browsers and making
horizontal positioning easier. Both these issues have improved dramatically,
with browsers converging and CSS Grid becoming available, respectively.

At this time, bootstrap offers little more than a somewhat more opinionated
set of margins and other defaults than what browsers ship with, plus some
higher-level components.

~~~
rchaud
This has less to do with "modern browsers" and more with how the site was
designed and the opportunity cost of switching.

Why would the developers of a Bootstrap-based site that works fine overhaul it
completely for CSS Grid, which has far less backwards compatibility? What
would be the benefit?

Bootstrap is more than just a layout grid, it's also a UI framework, so
abandoning it would mess up things like tabs, accordions, modals, etc.

Using Bootstrap isn't going to make your site less accessible or less secure.

[https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox](https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox)

[https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid](https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid)

~~~
KarlKemp
I didn’t mean to suggest that people should invest time to remove bootstrap.
Only that Bootstrap offers far less now than it did in the past, and shouldn’t
be considered the default option when starting any new project.

Among the downsides is its size, obviously. I also consider the html it
encourages among the ugliest things since the invention of PHP. This is from
the documentation:

    
    
        <button type="button" class="btn btn-dark">
    

Classes such as “col-sm” are little better than style=“...”. While
accessibility seems to have improved over the last years, my intuition is this
happened in spite of the idea of semantically meaningful HTML being abandoned
and not because of it. I used to worry about this, but had to abandon that
particular fight for the sake of my mental health at about the time someone
decided to name one of these frameworks “semantical”.

But with CSS Grids and Flexbox, layout has become just as easy and actually
more flexible than using Bootstrap. Why would you add code and become
pigeonholed into one framework when you could archive the same using vanilla
CSS?

~~~
rchaud
> Why would you add code and become pigeonholed into one framework when you
> could archive the same using vanilla CSS?

It's open source and can be forked and modded to your heart's content. How is
that being pigeonholed?

Most developers don't work at companies where they roll their own UI
components, and have QA and accessibility experts that can determine if their
in-house accordions, modals, etc. are ARIA compliant.

The business case for switching over has to go beyond "it's vanilla CSS",
especially if time can be better spent improving the user experience or
product features.

------
strenholme
I make sure my website is still 100% functional in IE11: Using only .jpg and
.png (I don’t use .gif on my website) for images; not using too much
Javascript; using .woff instead of .woff2 webfonts; text-shadow instead of
text-stroke to give one font an outline look; etc.

If I was building a node website which depended on a bunch of packages from
developers who may or may not care about IE11, this would not be possible. But
since I’ve done the entire design by hand with HTML and CSS for over a decade,
I can keep it IE11 compatible without issue. Also, everything works if
Javascript is turned off, and there are reasonable (if not great) fallback
fonts for users who disable webfonts.

~~~
duhi88
I support the second half of your comment. All websites (webapps excluded)
should strive for as little JS as possible. It isn't all that hard to support
IE11 for most things, if you aren't doing anything super crazy with your
design.

The first half though...we have grateful degradation for this reason. There's
no reason to serve larger woff fonts to all users when it is so easy to use it
as a fallback, preferring woff2 when supported. There are a lot of simple ways
to improve the experience and data consumption for modern devices without
sacrificing functionality in IE11.

~~~
strenholme
In my experience, the fastest way to serve a web font stack is via
base64-encoded web fonts in a single “font” CSS file; it’s more raw bytes but
fewer requests. To do it this way requires having all of the web fonts be in
the same lowest common denominator format, which is .woff.

I also add about 10k to the combined font stack file by adding hinting which
is _only_ seen on 75dpi displays, because too many users are still using low
resolution monitors.

The main reason I use woff fonts and their approximately 120k size is because
the days of “font-face: Verdana” giving (almost) everyone the same looking
website are a thing of the past with Android smart phones everywhere.

~~~
Nooshu
I'd be very careful recommending this method for loading webfonts. By Base64
encoding your fonts into a CSS file you are adding 1000's of bytes into a
browsers critical path (since CSS is render blocking). You are also removing
the browser ability to choose the most optimum font it supports (i.e. one with
better compression like WOFF2). Requests are cheap, especially when using
HTTP/2 (which multiplexes over a single TCP connection).

If you do use this method, I highly recommend testing both the standard
loading method vs Base64 method on a low spec device (e.g. Moto G4 via
WebPageTest) and seeing which performs best for your website.

This method used to be used on GOV.UK until we removed it 18 months ago. I
wrote about the change here if you are interested:
[https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2018/10/04/making-gov-uk-
page...](https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2018/10/04/making-gov-uk-pages-load-
faster-and-use-less-data/)

~~~
strenholme
Speed is about the same on my system: 370ms from hitting reload to having the
fonts downloaded when using inline CSS; 415ms from hitting reload to having
all of the woff2 fonts downloaded when using external resources (I should
point out the inline CSS actually has two more fonts). As I recall, the speed
difference was more pronounced when I tried this a few years ago.

I have had issues with a single font file sometimes hanging when trying to
load it, so having them all in one file is also more stable; I plan on getting
new hosting soon who will hopefully not have those kinds of issues. I also
very aggressively cache the font file so it is only loaded once every six
months for people who have been to my web page before.

It’s possible to avoid having base64 fonts block the loading of the page by
putting the relevant <style>@import url('/fonts.css');</style> at the _bottom_
of the page, at the expense of having a “flash” before the font is loaded.

I enjoyed reading the linked blog entry. One thing which stuck out is how you
guys are able to interact directly with the type foundry to get them to make
the web fonts smaller. I don’t have that luxury, but I do very aggressively
subset my fonts, and I use zopfli with its most aggressive compression setting
when making the WOFF fonts. I also use the Bitstream Charter font for italic
and bold serif text, since that particular font is a very nice looking open
source webfont with a very small size (download time) footprint. The main body
text of Bitstream Charter is a little too thin (thin strokes) on Windows +
Chrome (but it looks fine in IE, older Edge, and Firefox) especially on low
DPI displays, so I use its (using more space and longer load time, alas)
sister Charis SIL, a Bitstream Charter variant with thicker strokes, for the
main body text.

One final thought: I think I still have an old Moto G3 with WiFi I can use to
test things on that platform.

