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?

[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

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.

[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.

[ezekg]

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

[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.

[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).

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.