Dropping Support for Internet Explorer
In web development, 80% of headaches come from 20% of causes. We discuss how we are removing headaches in the removal of Internet Explorer.
A Word On Priority Support
In software development, it is fair to say that 80% of the headaches come from 20% of the causes.
Cutting those causes out and focusing on what makes the most impact is essential for all businesses starting.
Why Are We Cutting Internet Explorer?
The main catalyst to our decision to drop support for Internet Explorer comes from an article released by the Verge - 'Microsoft really doesn’t want you to use Internet Explorer anymore'
The article discusses strong opinions held by security experts working at Microsoft, referencing self-released blog posts such as - 'Perils of using Internet Explorer as your default browser.'
“Internet Explorer is a compatibility solution,” warns Jackson, rather than a browser that businesses should be using day to day for all web browsing activity. “We’re not supporting new web standards for it and, while many sites work fine, developers by and large just aren’t testing for Internet Explorer these days. They’re testing on modern browsers.” - Chris Jackson
How Internet Explorer Support Impacts Customers
In an article focused on the end of life of internet explorer 11, Neal Burger focuses on some of the issues related to several staff roles within software companies that are required to support Internet Explorer.
Some of our research highlights from Neal Burger included -
- By supporting Internet Explorer, the developed software will punish all other customers. Javascript would need to be compiled to ES5 instead of ES 6 which increases the bundle size in some cases by 30%. So a significant performance decrease for 97% of users
- Your development time increased by 30%. The time that could be spent on new features/quality improvement.
- Maintenance time increases. As code gets ‘hacked’ for IE. Then the next developer sees that mess and tries to figure out what is going on.
- Overall the Development time is about 10–30% higher for supporting IE 11