Dropping Internet Explorer 11 support on EF web properties
Microsoft has officially retired IE on June 15, 2022: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2022/06/15/internet-explorer-11-has-retired-and-is-officially-out-of-support-what-you-need-to-know/
With this announcement, I would like to announce that we plan on dropping IE 11 support on October 1st, 2022 January 1st, 2024.
After reviewing our website for May, I was able to see that only 2.5% of our users are using IE.
I don't believe the effort needed to support IE 11 is justified anymore.
Please let us know if you have any objections or concerns with this announcement!
Activity
I think this has been a long time coming for EF web support. There are a lot of things that are considered common and normal things in JS and CSS that we just can't use because they are utterly broken in IE. Add to that that IE is no longer even receiving security updates, I think it's the right call to nudge our users to drop the insecure and outdated browser.
Add to that that Bootstrap 5, what would likely be the foundation of our next CSS theme, explicitly states it doesn't support IE? I'm all for this.
for additional context, the real cost for the EF WebDev team is blocking modernization. We can't upgrade to Bootstrap 5 for a new theme whenever we do it because of no IE support. A lot of really well-loved CSS+JS features aren't available, and it means we need to add polyfills on every page to get similar functionality. Polyfills aren't usually too big, but it adds to every request.
added team:webdev label
added Security ~21670 statereview labels
assigned to @cguindon
It's worth noting that while IE11 itself is out of support, the IE11 rendering engine/platform (MSHTML/Trident) is not.
chapters
Which platforms will be affected when the IE11 desktop application is retired and goes out of support on June 15, 2022? (Updated: June 13, 2022)
and
What is the MSHTML (Trident) engine? How does that relate to IE mode? And what about WebOC? Or the MSHTA app?
for details.
Heavily breaking changes to the website would therefore mean that it would break in any kind of embedding scenario on Windows where the MSHTML engine is still used -- including the Eclipse IDE and its 'Internal Web Browser' itself.
Heavily breaking changes to the website would therefore mean that it would break in any kind of embedding scenario on Windows where the MSHTML engine is still used -- including the Eclipse IDE and its 'Internal Web Browser' itself.
@sratz Are you referencing past releases of the IDE, or are you indicating that the current release of the Eclipse IDE on Windows still utilizes the MSHTML engine?
Edited by Christopher Guindon-
Additionally, could you elaborate on which integrations between the eclipse.org website and the Eclipse IDE's embedded browser you believe may be negatively impacted by this transition?
Edited by Christopher Guindon Even the latest version of the Eclipse IDE still uses the MSHTML engine on Windows.
There is no mandatory integration between eclipse.org and the IDE (that I am aware of).
It's just that you can, for example go to 'Window -> Show View -> Internal Web Browser', and then go to eclipe.org in there:
and I just thought it would be good if at least eclipse.org would still work in the Eclipse IDE ;-)
Modern browser integration is one of the high-priority topics of the IDE currently, so hopefully the IDE can move away from the IE engine in the not-so-far future.
Edited by Sebastian Ratz
-
We are still doing our best to support IE. However, we do have plans to migrate to Bootstrap 5 next year and that framework no longer supports Internet Explorer.
https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/getting-started/browsers-devices/
-
Closing this issue now that the due date has passed! We no longer officially support Internet Explorer 11 on EF web properties.
Edited by Christopher Guindon
