Request for comment: dropping support for IE8/IE9

philwareham · 2015-10-19 17:59:15

Currently in 4.6dev we support IE8 (this means additional stylesheets – both public and admin side) plus SVG fallbacks to PNG and adherence to v1.x of jQuery. Also Selectivizr can then be removed from vendors directory.

Microsoft officially drops support for IE8 on January 12th 2016. We are planning to release Textpattern 4.6 at the end of January 2016.

Currently with the workload of 4.6, specifically the admin layout update I’m two-third of the way through, I only have Hive on the radar for theme available at 4.6.0. Classic and Remora may have to wait. By removing IE8 support I may be able to squeeze those into the 4.6.0 release too.

Many organisations/projects have already dropped IE8 support, including Google, Salesforce, Bootstrap (v4) and Drupal (v8) to name a few. I quietly dropped support in this forum for IE8 two weeks ago and have not had one complaint/issue raised.

GitHub discussion here

colak · 2015-10-19 18:48:58

+1 for dropping it.

hcgtv · 2015-10-19 19:21:02

Phil, where would you like feedback for the admin-layout-update branch, on the forum or GitHub?

As for IE8, never used IE, have always been a Netscape -> Firefox user. Dropping support for it would be fine in my book, I test sites with Firefox and Chrome, occasionally I’ll fire up Edge. And yes I know, it’s about visitors coming to our sites, but I could care less about IE’s idiosyncracies. And if it speeds up your work on other admin themes, then drop it like a hot potato.

As for anything else you, stef or anybody wants to jettison from the code base, you have my blanket approval.

gaekwad · 2015-10-19 20:45:15

Drop it. 4.5.7 is available for folks who need to support IE8.

gomedia · 2015-10-19 20:57:07

Kill it.

towndock · 2015-10-19 21:57:53

Agreed.

ruud · 2015-10-19 22:16:26

gaekwad wrote #296034:

Drop it. 4.5.7 is available for folks who need to support IE8.

Not if they have to upgrade for security reasons.

gaekwad · 2015-10-19 22:22:18

ruud wrote #296037:

Not if they have to upgrade for security reasons.

Fair point. For perspective: www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/product_id-9900/version_id-57626/Microsoft-Internet-Explorer-8.html

etc · 2015-10-19 22:31:09

What exactly will be broken if you remove ie8 support?

GugUser · 2015-10-20 00:07:09

I think it’s time to remove the IE 8 support.

phiw13 · 2015-10-20 01:23:59

I’m on two minds about this. On the side, IE8 is an old, and nowadays dangerous to use, browser. On the other hand, I have a client who uses IE 8 as their browser (cash strapped small business in the decrepit economy of northern Japan — but their site doesn’t use Textpattern). To be fair, it is still trivial, at the presentation level to make the presentation layer for the admin side work in IE 8, even without Selectivizr and the like. Someone who really need to support IE 8 could easily do something decent here, either as a fork of the default admin theme or a full fledge 3rd party theme.

The elephant in the room is Jquery, as in: moving to Jquery 2.x which does not support IE 8.

(and that being said, for my own admin theme, Sandspace, I’m now considering only supporting IE 11 and up, along with Safari 8+, Firefox 38+)

What’s the support matrix for that other CMS (aka WP)? Didn’t find anything on their site.

philwareham · 2015-10-20 06:53:59

phiw13 wrote #296045:

What’s the support matrix for that other CMS (aka WP)? Didn’t find anything on their site.

Here’s a couple:

Craft CMS – IE10
Drupal (8) – IE9

It’s not that I can’t support IE8, and Hive does already via an IE8 specific stylesheet (though I’d prefer to strip it out). I just don’t want to have the extra support overhead of officially supporting IE8.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2015-10-19 17:59:15