Remove IE from BCD

[queengooborg]

Microsoft has announced an official End of Life date for Internet Explorer to be June 15, 2022¹². In the documentation, Microsoft recommends Edge's built-in "IE mode" for viewing legacy sites which require IE. To add to it, Internet Explorer has 0.47% of the global market share now, which is less than UC Browser's (which we removed a while back)³.

We should consider removing IE sometime soon due to these combined factors, most likely on or around the EOL date.

Footnotes

1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/internet-explorer-11-end-of-support#:~:text=Internet%20Explorer%20(IE)%2011%20is,certain%20versions%20of%20Windows%2010*. ↩

2. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/05/19/the-future-of-internet-explorer-on-windows-10-is-in-microsoft-edge/ ↩

3. https://gs.statcounter.com/ ↩

[Seirdy]

IE still has a high market share in regions like Japan (~5%, give or take a few, depending on your source).

It might be worth replacing IE with "Edge IE Mode" or similar, since that will be maintained for the next several years.

FTR, I'm happy to see IE on its way out, but I'm unsure about removing documentation on supported features. I suppose that as long as it's available in the commit history and the Wayback Machine it's not the end of the world.

[makotokato]

IE11 for Windows 10 will be EOL, but IE11 on Windows server etc aren't EOL. See https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/internet-explorer-11-desktop-app-retirement-faq/ba-p/2366549

[Seirdy]

Another data point: 3.3% of respondents to the latest WebAIM screenreader survey use IE: https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey9/#browsers

IE has long had disproportionate representation among screenreader users. Combine this with the fact that Edge's "IE Mode" will be supported for several years and it looks like having some docs about its feature support would be helpful.

[ddbeck]

Some related discussion on mdn/content: https://github.com/mdn/content/discussions/14953. One thing I'd highlight from my comment there: there will be a period when IE information will continue to be useful, even after EOL (e.g., for developers migrating applications near or shortly past the mainstream EOL, or developers in environments with extended support).

I'd suggest adopting a posture of conservatism when it comes to removing such data from BCD itself. In line with other irrelevance guidelines, 2 years after EOL would be conventional, though it might make sense to drop it sooner, if, for example, BrowserStack and similar tools dropped IE.

[lukewarlow]

If it's not possible to remove all support data would it be possible to treat it more like node and deno where we only include it if it has support? This would keep the data for existing APIs, but would mean new APIs that IE will never support don't need to include the false data, and if I understand the MDN consumer properly wouldn't show in the MDN browser table.

[jamiebuilds]

Raising this again now that June 15th has come and gone.

1. Would it be possible to run an experiment where IE data is hidden behind a button and MDN measures how many people actually click the button?
2. Should there be a separate section for deprecated browsers? Does the MDN team really want to maintain that forever (keeping in mind that "maintaining" it is just saying "not supported" for every new feature from now on)

[Seirdy]

Wrote up my thoughts on IE's EOL on my site: https://seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/15/internet-explorer-is-almost-gone/ Copy-pasting an excerpt below:

if you’re a government or healthcare website you might still want to test with IE-mode to make sure critical functionality is at least usable. There are still companies that require you to use their sites in Internet Explorer with compatibility mode (emulates either IE 7 or IE 5, depending on some properties of the markup/headers). QuickBooks Desktop 2022 and PEACH. And as long as some software requires IE and there exist people who want to use one browser for everything, there will be people who set it as their default browser. You’ll probably need to support it if you have a log-in page that can be summoned when someone uses you as an OAuth provider; lots of software uses IE libraries to render the log-in window, and those aren’t going anywhere. Internet Explorer isn’t in Windows 11, but the .dll files for this are. IE is still supported for LTSC and government editions of Windows, and on Windows 7 ESU.

MDN does not show compatibility information for evergreen versions of browsers; it shows versions for which new features were released across a browser's entire lifetime. I don't think removing IE information would be of any benefit to web developers.

…

-- Seirdy

[NagayamaToshiaki]

@Seirdy In this logic, we need to add information about Netscape compatibility. Legacys should be buried and forget them (unless you're a historian).

[teoli2003]

Closing this. We are well aware of the IE status, and we will not forget about it. No need to keep this duplicate open.

[queengooborg]

TLDR for everyone regarding IE data: after valuable feedback and some careful deliberation, we have decided that removing IE from BCD itself is a little too early, however we are interested in experimenting around with the rendering on MDN Web Docs to hide IE. While the EOL of IE for desktop consumers has finally come, IE is still under support in certain circumstances (and still heavily used in certain markets). We'll re-evaluate removal in two years or so!

Since IE is dead, however, I will personally not be focusing on maintaining IE data. While I won't turn down others' PRs to fix IE data, I will not be writing any myself (or writing few that have changes for other browsers), and will consider IE-related issues to be low priority. A decision was made to no longer maintain IE data since BCD v5.2.0, so no PRs focusing on updating IE data will be merged, any PRs that update IE on the side will not be verified for accuracy.

Note: IE is now hidden from MDN pages. For those who still need it, IE data is still accessible through BCD itself, and at the time of this writing, CanIUse.

[carlosjeurissen]

Even tho this issue is closed, I still want to at the following: it may not be that simple, yet an out of the box solution might be to just regard IE as being the same browser as Edge. IE stops at version 11, and Edge starts at version 12. Just like Opera and Edges switch to the Chromium engine, which also did not mean a split in the browser compat data.

We can come up with an algorithm which merges the compat data from IE and Edge. If incompatible with IE and compatible with edge. we can state compatibility starting Edge v12+ if edge includes the feature from day 1. If something was already supported in IE8, we can say edge starting from version 8. For added clarity we can rename "edge" to "IE/Edge".