Are these users of a forum you’re maintaining, or is this theoretical? Feedback about how we could minimize disruption due to the depreciation is always welcome.
Outside of a few exceptions that are on legacy enterprise systems, within our hosting purview we see about 1% overall IE11 usage.
Discourse as open-source software wouldn’t exist without our hosting side of the business, and what it more or less boils down to is a business decision.
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Does it make sense for us to expend 10%+ of our development resources to support a constantly declining 1% of our users?
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Does it make sense to limit our engineering team (which also impacts hiring prospects)?
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Does it make sense to leave other Discourse users (~99% of our customers’ users) with worse performance and possible security vulnerabilities because we’re supporting a very outdated browser? (Note that the cybersecurity exec at Microsoft has advised against using IE11 Microsoft security chief: IE is not a browser, so stop using it as your default | ZDNet)
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Microsoft has painted themselves into a corner where they assured their corporate partners that Windows 10 won’t break their legacy applications, which has elevated IE11 to be near-eternal… are Microsoft’s corporate customers’ legacy applications a good reason to limit Discourse?
IE usage is also dropping very rapidly among users that rely on screen readers and based on the current trends will be less than 10% by 2020 (WebAIM: Screen Reader User Survey #8 Results).
Discourse set out with the mission to modernize communities on the web. Are we achieving that goal when we hold the majority of users back because 1% can’t/won’t upgrade?
It might be a hard change to make for some users with limited skills, resources, or abilities… but as far as IE goes the change is inevitable. Will this small subset of users be more capable 5 years from now?