Hi. I need to better understand what this will mean come next June. I haven’t touched IE in many years, but I do have a significant number of users who do use it on older computers, and these are not users in a position to easily change browsers or buy new computers! I need to know what “dropping support” means for those users, who I cannot leave out in the cold! Thanks.
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We are still discussing the details of it, and will release our official plan in mid January.
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Thanks. There are still many users trapped in IE without recourse, and these are often users with minimal computer skills on old computers that they cannot afford to replace, and who would not be able to easily switch to another browser (which is usually why they’re still on IE now!). Also, these are often users in demographics that are already disenfranchised in other ways, and who depend on their old computers and the forums they use to not be further isolated.
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Support will be dropped for Internet Explorer not for old PCs. As far as I know, Firefox is available everywhere Internet Explorer 11 is.
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You’re missing the point. These are users who cannot easily switch to and learn new browsers. They would have switched long ago if they could have. I take it you don’t support any special needs users yourself, right? No friends or family with special needs far away stuck on old computers with old browsers and no way to upgrade them?
Many of these users took ages just to get IE configured so that it was minimally readable for them. Even computer literate users can have problems switching to Firefox. Ceasing to have even minimal support for IE is kicking these already disadvantaged users in the teeth, and will not be a PR boost for Discourse when it becomes widely known.
And I’ll add, saying “just switch to Firefox” suggests that you don’t have a clue about what is involved in supporting this category of already disadvantaged users.
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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?
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Hi. Let me back up a moment and address the general form issue (though I’ll say now that this is not theoretical, I don’t run a large forum myself but I care about the users who are still stuck on IE, who tend to have either low computer literacy, be extremely elderly (but still very active!) or both. When I say elderly, I mean in the 80s, 90s, approaching 100! And they still make great posts and care. I don’t want to kick them out when I know they will never upgrade their systems. There are still people running Windows Me! Windows Vista! You get the drift. Scary from a security standpoint? Definitely. But that’s the reality.
I am always concerned when I see marginalized populations expressed in term of percentages. I’ve criticized various large platforms regarding this kind of issue for many years when it comes to various UI decisions. Those tiny percentages can still represent significant numbers of warm bodies. Will they all be around (or alive?) in 5 years? I dunno. That’s the wrong question, I believe. I’m more concerned about quality of life now.
Obviously, one doesn’t expect all the features of a forum to be available forever to people running old systems and old browsers. However, I would assert that providing continued access to basic functionalities is important (note, for example, how even today Gmail has a greatly simplified “basic HTML mode” available).
Ultimately, I would request that the team think less about the percentages and more about the actual human beings. You can safely assume that anyone still stuck on IE has reasons for being in that position, likely beyond their practical ability to alter at this point. They’re usually already disadvantaged and cut off from most of the world. It is very disturbing to me when I see technical decisions being made that marginalize them as “unimportant” even further.
Thanks very much for your consideration.
Lauren Weinstein
https://lauren.vortex.com
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I understand where you’re coming from, and appreciate that you’re looking out. We just need to draw a line somewhere unfortunately.
It is possible that we could serve our no-JS/web-crawler view to users on unsupported browsers; at the very least that would grant them the ability to access the community’s content. As mentioned earlier our plans aren’t 100% complete yet, so there are more details to work out.
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Thanks very much. Please let me know if my input can be of any use during this process.
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Lauren，作为一名残障人士，我对你的核心观点深有共鸣。我也有两位年迈的父母，他们仍在“活跃”使用 iPhone 和 Windows 10 电脑，而我花了很多时间帮助他们理解短信和电子邮件的区别等等。
我的本意是提供 reassurance，希望你也这样感受到。根据我多年 IT 行业的经验，如果你的“用户”（我不确定该用什么词——社区成员？）还在旧版 Windows 上使用旧版 IE，那么他们实际上已经承受了最多的 bug、功能缺失和特性不足的问题。因此，今年一月的变更对他们不会有任何影响。他们本来就没有 Windows 10 和 IE 搭配 Silverlight 等那些“花哨功能”，所以在某种意义上，他们反而是对 IE 11 停止新功能支持准备得最充分的一群人。
（我并非 Discourse 的员工，只是一个普通的 IT 从业者）
希望这能让你稍微安心一些。
我也向开发团队致敬，他们没有发布恐吓性的信息强迫用户迁移到新浏览器，也没有采取类似做法，而是默默地将精力集中在其他方面。
matt
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谢谢，Matt！非常感谢！
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是否已经提到过 EdgeHTML？“微软宣布计划将 Edge 浏览器重建为基于 Chromium 的浏览器”，这让即将过时的 Microsoft Edge 版本相形见绌。
这是否是因为 Chromium 版 Edge 的发布日期（2020 年 1 月 15 日）？
有趣的是，我刚刚意识到，在 IE11 中打开新标签页时，它会重定向到该页面（并非总是如此）…… 
我读到微软将把所有指向旧版 Edge 的快捷方式替换为新版 Edge，因此可以合理推测，我们将仅支持新版 Edge，因为旧版 Edge 将逐渐从大多数用户的桌面上消失。
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那应用程序本身呢？它是否会通过 Windows 更新进行推送？如果是，这是否是一个可选更新？如果是可选更新，那么并非所有人都会安装新版 Edge。
撇开这一点不谈，我倒希望新标志会让普通用户误以为这是新版 Firefox 和 Google Chrome 的合体。哦，如果你愿意，还可以加上 Internet Explorer。
编辑：我找到了一些相当有趣的信息，但我仍然想知道该更新是否为强制性的，更不用说 Edge 阻止工具包了。
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我刚刚下载了 稳定版。它完全替换了旧版本的 Microsoft Edge。所有的快捷方式以及实际应用程序都被替换为基于 Chromium 的 Microsoft Edge 版本。
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官方公告已发布。
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