Discourse will be dropping IE9 support in 2016

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I think we’re going to drop IE9 support starting in 2016.

Now that Windows 10 is just about out (by the end of July), and Windows Edge / IE12 will officially be released with it, this means our IE support matrix would be

  • Edge/IE12
  • IE11
  • IE10

IE9 has always been a pretty terrible experience for Discourse because it lacked pushState support, so the URL in the address bar never changed… and it was the ragged edge of “kinda works, but may not look great” that represents our absolute minimum browser platform.

If you have any objections to this, please make your case here. :wink:

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We may officially support a read only plain HTML mode for older browsers like IE9.

@riking had a pull request that did nearly this, maybe we can make that more official for better “super old browser” support.

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I usually follow Google’s lead… they dropped IE9 support in 2013.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/11/google-drops-support-for-ie9.html

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Only in Google Docs though, right? Not for Google search proper, their primary business…

5

Correct. Google Search itself is fundamental enough that they probably support all browsers within reason (I just checked with IE6, no problem).

All the more complex apps (Maps, Calendar, Gmail, etc.) display a “browser not supported” message. Some don’t even load.

6

In general, Gmail supports the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. If you use a browser other than those, you’ll be automatically directed to the basic HTML view of Gmail.

So the basic HTML view will be more important for us… but note that basic HTML is a read only view for Discourse.

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Interesting data point.

IE9 and 10 have been broken on meta for at least a few week and on virtual host for at least a week (all business/standard)

We got zero complaints on meta.

I think it is very safe to drop IE9 write support in 2016, and refocus on decent readonly support for all older browsers out of the box.

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8

This would line up nicely with Microsoft’s own plans; looks like they’ll be dropping support for IE 9 for everything but Vista and Server 2008 SP2 on January 12.

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9

do you release statistics? like what percentage of people visiting discourse.org even use it?

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Just a reminder, come Jan 1 2016, IE9 is gone from our support matrix. With prejudice.

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When IE9 support is officially dropped, will visitors using IE9 see a message similar to the IE8 “Unfortunately, your browser is too old…” message? Or will they see a readonly version?

Just checking what experience I need to prepare for.

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They will get an increasingly broken experience. My vote would be to add them to the “your browser is too old” JS.

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Thanks for the reply. On our site we have a small but significant enough percentage of IE9 users (although on a downward trend), such that the basic HTML view would be ideal. How close did @riking get as mentioned in the earlier comment?

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If it’s a problem we can basically do nothing, and they’ll get the current behavior. The problem is that over time we stop testing on IE9 so it could get very broken, very fast… as in render a white blank page broken.

(These kinds of IE9 regressions happen about every 3 months in my experience. It is a hard browser to support.)

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As of 1.5 beta 8 and beyond, IE9 has been removed from our support matrix and all IE9 hacks (there were only a few) have been removed from the codebase.

:skull: IE9

where’s my middle finger emoji when I need it

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