Proposal to remove IE 11 support from Infusion

Thu May 14 17:59:50 UTC 2020

Thanks for those who have provided feedback. It’s been a couple of weeks and I haven’t heard any dissenting points for removing IE 11 support. I think we can consider this proposal supported. At this point, we should no longer consider that anything beyond the 2.x line of Infusion provides official support for IE 11.

Thanks
Justin

> On Apr 30, 2020, at 10:54 AM, Justin Obara <obara.justin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Alan,
> 
> Thanks for sharing. In the case of IE 11 it’s a bit confusing, but it appears that it will receive technical support at least through 2023 due to its inclusion in Windows 8. Related to Windows 10 it may depend on if/when they remove it from Windows 10. For LTSB builds of Windows 10, it looks like it will have extended support till at least 2029. However, that support is probably only for security issues.
> 
> Thanks
> Justin
> 
>> On Apr 30, 2020, at 10:40 AM, Alan Harnum <aharnum at ocadu.ca <mailto:aharnum at ocadu.ca>> wrote:
>> 
>> +1 to removing IE11 support. It may also be worth reviewing Microsoft’s own comments about IE11’s support period: https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/17454/lifecycle-faq-internet-explorer-and-edge <https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/17454/lifecycle-faq-internet-explorer-and-edge>
>>  
>> From: fluid-work <fluid-work-bounces at lists.idrc.ocad.ca <mailto:fluid-work-bounces at lists.idrc.ocad.ca>> On Behalf Of Colin Clark
>> Sent: April 30, 2020 9:31 AM
>> To: Justin Obara <obara.justin at gmail.com <mailto:obara.justin at gmail.com>>
>> Cc: fluid-work at lists.idrc.ocad.ca <mailto:fluid-work at lists.idrc.ocad.ca>
>> Subject: Re: Proposal to remove IE 11 support from Infusion
>>  
>> Hi Justin,
>>  
>> I feel quite strongly that the cost and complexity of maintaining support for IE 11 strongly outweighs the value of it at this point in time. Infusion’s mandate is to explore how programming in the future could be a more inclusive practice if users were able to adapt their software and continue the design process on their own, without being expert programmers. That’s a very ambitious goal, and we have a small community—so anything we can do to simplify the work and focus on this goal seems preferable to me.
>>  
>> Colin
>>  
>> 
>> 
>> On Apr 30, 2020, at 8:44 AM, Justin Obara <obara.justin at gmail.com <mailto:obara.justin at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>  
>> Hi Everyone,
>>  
>> I would like to get community feedback on Infusion no longer supporting IE 11. The discussion kicked up again after work on FLUID-6488 <https://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-6488>; see discussion in comments. Initially we planned to move off of supporting IE 11 after the Infusion 3.0 release. We had hoped to have that out in early 2020. However, due to a variety of factors, including the current pandemic, our work on Infusion has slowed and the actual 3.0 release date isn’t clear. 
>>  
>> What we’d like to propose now is to immediately stop officially supporting IE 11. That doesn’t mean we’ll be going through and removing IE 11 specific code from Infusion right away; although that may happen over time. It does mean that we’ll no longer test in IE 11 and will no longer guarantee that Infusion works in IE 11.
>>  
>> In the immediate case this will reduce maintenance and development burdens. In the long run, and why we always needed to eventually drop support, is that IE 11 support is preventing us from using more modern JS and CSS techniques, APIs, and etc. Already we don’t support Text-to-Speech in IE 11 and Proxy <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Proxy> is another features we’d like to use in the framework. (See: FLUID-6372 <https://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-6372>).
>>  
>> Depending on the benchmark you look at, IE 11 usage sits around 2-4% (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers>). As the linked article mentions the accuracy of these metrics are susceptible to over and under estimations from a technical perspective. Additionally we know that there are a variety of other reasons why numbers may not tell the whole story. With that in mind, I want to also check with those in the community that use Infusion and get an understanding of your requirements and thoughts on this in general.
>>  
>> Thanks
>> Justin
>>  
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