1422435 - Drop IE 11 support

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

We decided BMO's supported browsers 7 months ago in Bug 1359310.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO#Browser_Support_For_BMO

It basically makes sense, but still, I'd like to drop the support for IE 11 for the following reasons:

* Under Project Bugzilla Harmony, BMO will be the base of Bugzilla 6.0. Some frontend code enhancements, including HTML4->HTML5 and YUI->jQuery migrations, need to be backported from the current upstream. Some changes may not be able to simply backported due to the significant differences; we have to code from almost scratch in that case.

* It's almost 2018. I'd like to drop not only YUI but also jQuery to move onto pure, modern ECMAScript coding practices. The same applies to CSS. IE 11 is obviously the major obstacle.

* The IE 11 EOL by Microsoft is October 2025. It's unrealistic to keep supporting the legacy browser until then.

* Salesforce is dropping the IE 11 support this month. https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer16/release-notes/rn_general_lex_retires_ie11.htm

* Mozilla is a pioneer in developing and promoting modern web standards. Though Bugzilla is used in various organizations, we could be less conservative about the browser support and technology adoptions. (Note that Firefox ESR disables some latest features like Service Workers by default, so we can't be very progressive.)

* The Bugzilla 5.x support will continue for 4 months after Bugzilla 6.0 is shipped. That means, if 6.0 is shipped in August 2018, people can continue using 5.x until the end of 2018. Still have 1 year from now until the deprecation.

* Talking about BMO, most users are on Firefox and Chrome. (We should ask Google Analytics next week for the actual numbers.) It's not a consumer site like www.mozilla.org, SUMO and AMO. The impact of dropping the IE 11 support should be minimum even if we do it now.

Thoughts?

Comment 1

[Dylan Hardison [:dylan] (he/him)]

I think the bug-filing view should have slightly larger back-compat requirements, but that's it.

Comment 2

[:glob ✱]

(In reply to Kohei Yoshino [:kohei] from comment #0)
> The impact of dropping the IE 11 support should be minimum even if we do it now.

from bug 1359310 comment 13, which imho still applies:

> if firefox doesn't start on windows the user needs to be able to report a bug.
> 
> there are versions of windows supported by firefox that ship with IE instead of edge.
> by [dropping IE11] it's possible that these users will either have to download chrome
> to report a firefox bug, or, more likely, the bug won't be reported.  this use-case
> is likely to be one that's hard to capture with usage data.
> 
> as edge requires windows 10, and firefox still supports windows 7, this means that
> IE 11 should be a supported browser even if that support is limited to just sign-up,
> bug creation, and show-bug.

(In reply to Dylan Hardison [:dylan] (he/him) from comment #1)
> I think the bug-filing view should have slightly larger back-compat
> requirements, but that's it.

you'll also need to support account creation, and show_bug – after a bug has been filed it's important that the user can view the bug.

that all said i see value in demoting IE11 support to "just functional enough to work"; it needn't be pretty, but it also shouldn't look like unstyled content.

Comment 3

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

I'd like to completely and explicitly drop the IE 11 support now on BMO and later with Bugzilla 6.0, because it lacks many modern goodies such as the ECMAScript class syntax and CSS variables. Then IE 11 will behave like a browser with JavaScript disabled, but it's probably possible to ensure most of the basic site functionalities continue working thanks to the static site nature of Bugzilla.

In the future, I want to make page navigations dynamic like what you see in Facebook, Twitter, Slack or whatever, but even in that case, I believe that every bug page should be statically accessible especially for SEO.

Comment 4

[:glob ✱]

(In reply to Kohei Yoshino [:kohei] from comment #3)
> Then IE 11 will behave like a browser with JavaScript disabled, but it's
> probably possible to ensure most of the basic site functionalities continue
> working thanks to the static site nature of Bugzilla.

right now BMO doesn't provide any guarantees of even basic functionality if javascript is disabled; if you were to treat IE11 as a javascript-less browser then there may be work required to ensure basic functionality does indeed work in this mode.

-

perhaps i'm worrying about nothing.  we've been collecting the UA for reported bugs for about three years, so it should be possible to get an actual count of IE11 users.

(time passes)

for 2017: 121 out of 95275 bugs (0.13%).  from eyeballing the summaries it looks like only a handful are due to firefox installation, startup, or "impacts all sites" issues.

in light of that i retract my concerns around "we need to support IE11 in some capacity for those who can use IE11 but not firefox".

Comment 5

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Thanks for the data! That's pretty ignorable number like older IEs. There might be a bit more IE 11 users on other Bugzilla instances, but I'm not worrying much given the majority are open source communities including Linux distros.

I actually want to leverage the fact of having a unique customer base to make Bugzilla a showcase of modern web standards or, in Google's term, a progressive web app. That's what I aimed at with BzDeck, and it's good for Mozilla to have such a state-of-the-art living product. For me, this is more than just a browser support discussion. For Bugzilla built with decade-old technologies, this really triggers a quantum leap ;)

Comment 6

[Dylan Hardison [:dylan] (he/him)]

I'm not sure where else this is documented, but we can now consider IE11 unsupported.

Comment 7

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Updated Wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO#Browser_Support_For_BMO