Once Microsoft releases their Chromium version of Edge next year on January 15th, how long will Discourse continue to support the old Microsoft Edge? Is there a roadmap for browser support?
The answer we typically give is “we support current versions of the major 4 browsers, IE, Chrome, FF, and Safari”. Major browsers don’t typically disappear like IE, so this is a new situation.
I’m not sure what good it would do. With browsers like Chrome and Firefox (and the new Edge) updating every 6 weeks or so, the roadmap would be outdated extremely quickly.
What’s the use case here? The vast majority of users run up to date browsers, and needn’t worry about the exact version of Chrome, for example. When we deprecate support for a browser, like we’re doing for IE, it’ll be announced.
Falco gave it to you. IE11 support will be dropped June 2020. As of today, there have been no other formal decisions on dropping support for other browsers.
Can you share actual numbers on browser usage? Enterprises for example sometimes keep their browsers a few versions behind. I sometimes use Discourse at work, but I don’t know if that’s common. I’m just kind of curious if “vast majority” means closer to 80% or 98%.
I’ll have to see if this is something I can easily pull stats on for our hosting.
Global stats, however, are easy to find. Check out StatCounter or CanIUse for example. According to CanIUse, IE has barely 2% usage. Chrome, between desktop and Android has over 50%.
We’re aware. We’ll be notifying customers who have reported IE11 issues to us previously a little closer to when we remove support. Also, note that removing support doesn’t mean we make Discourse stop working on those browsers. It simply means we’re not going to fix every bug we find that is specific to that browser.
It’s also worth mentioning that as of October, Microsoft Edge is on par with Internet Explorer in terms of market share. I would like to assume that the market share for Microsoft Edge will significantly grow once the Chromium version is released in a few months. As a result, dropping support for the old Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer at the same time would make sense.