Should i support ie8

Windows XP is one of their favorite playgrounds. Every site should provide extra security by running their entire site on https. Gone are the days when log-in and checkout were the only portions of the site in https. Google is also starting to use https as a ranking signal. SHA-2 is now the standard for providing https encryption on the web. And only because Windows added it to SP3 after the fact.

Apparently Eventbrite ran into this very problem shortly before I started. Quick overview on ES5 features lacking in IE8 :. Stop holding us back IE8! However a lot of its functionality had made its way to browsers long before. Neither does IE9. IE10 only supports a little bit. According to caniuse. Here are some of the most popular ones:.

Many things that developers had to resort to coding in JavaScript could now be done more optimally in CSS. Way to hold the Web back, IE8…. Graceful degradation was a big promise in and during the big HTML5 hoopla. While this was technically true, in practice it really was not. These features like input placeholders, rounded corners, and transitions. So in order to not have a broken experience in a supported browser, we developers are left with float or inline-block hacks.

Mobile marketshare increases every month as more and more users access their favorite websites on their mobile devices. This is why Luke Wroblewski pushed for mobile-first design way back in , publishing his Mobile First book in Even if we get mobile-first designs from designers, we still cannot implement mobile-first because of IE8. Ideally we would write our CSS such that the default styling is for narrow mobile screens.

Then using media queries , we can write CSS for devices larger than narrow screens such as tablets. We could continue the process targeting large desktop screens and even huge TV screens. We write our CSS such that the default styling is for large screens and work our way down. This is effectively mobile-last implementation and usually results in overriding a lot of CSS rules to remove stylings not needed at smaller screen sizes.

This results in a large amount of duplicate code between it and the CSS targeting the desktop screen sizes. All of these approaches result in additional code that would not be needed if IE8 had native support for the functionality. Modern browsers get all of this just-for-IE8 code as well even though they have native support. Modern browsers are heavier because of IE8. Think about libraries like jQuery and underscore. But when you look at underscore.

How much lighter would underscore. And what about jQuery? They introduced jQuery 2. This was a step in the right direction; moving the web forward. However, jQuery announced jQuery 3. The preferred jQuery 3. But there is also jQuery Compat 3. I agree with JonW that the people who are stuck in the situation likely can't upgrade so a modal bugging them to do so it pointless. But getting the site to work in IE7 does not mean it has to look the same as it does in the latest Firefox.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Do websites still have to support Internet Explorer 8 and below? Asked 7 years, 2 months ago. Active 6 years, 6 months ago.

Viewed 41k times. Improve this question. Community Bot 1. GhostRider GhostRider 1, 1 1 gold badge 9 9 silver badges 14 14 bronze badges. In fact, the question is about user experience. In this case, user experience for IE users — GhostRider. To make clear a point that's been hinted at in a few comments as well as answers - you need it to fail gracefully - it's perfectly possible to have adequate UX for a website in pure html though there are many reasons not to.

As someone who works with Hospitals, I share your pain. But Hospitals are usually stuck with what their IT department gives them, which is Windows XP, so they can't go higher than Internet Explorer 8 anyway.

We tend to show a banner that says, "Your version of internet explorer is not supported, so some features have been disabled. I recommend using the HTML5shiv as a quick fix. One of the main problems with the older browsers is they simply don't know what to do with the newer HTML5 elements, HTML5shiv is a little bit of javascript that fixes this issue and a few others too.

It may not make the site work perfectly in older browsers but it might just make it work well enough. This question appears to be off-topic because it is too localized. Whether to support a particular old browser has to be decided on a project by project basis based on target audience, technology, budget and a plethora of other factors.

Show 8 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. All good points. I think I'm going to have write some conditional style sheets. A bit annoying, but I risk embarrassment when I release this GhostRider It's better you find this now than when it launches and you get loads of angry emails from people who can't use it.

It's too late then! Let me save you a ton of time, if you don't already know this hack. Side-question: how's the site look in IE8 and IE9? That's quite a significant number.

And even if the total number was only people, that is still people that you are refusing to accommodate. Shortsightedness like this would appear to be exactly why the OP is having a problem! Show 12 more comments. Benny Skogberg Benny Skogberg There is likely a reason it's still on IE7 though. And it's unlikely to just be ignorance "oh, we didn't realise the browsers were out of date, even though we're the IT department".

Upgrading a whole corporation like this is a very costly affair. Imagine the press - "Local hospital spends millions updating internet browsers instead of hiring new nurses". AwalGarg The browser download may be free, but the infrastructure to run it isn't. Various strange things can happen. I saved the toughest section for last. I went ahead and started out with the toughest problem first.

No one — which is why some smart guys built es5-shim , a library which adds support for many ES5 API updates. This is largely because of the ES5-non-support issue es5-shim will help with this. Each new library you add means another potential point of failure when supporting IE8.

No WebGL support. Angular, Ember, Backbone, and React — none of the most recent versions of any of these support IE8 out of the box. Older versions of Angular do support IE8, but who wants to use a deprecated version of anything?

After reading all of this — you probably never want to support IE8. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion. Running Internet Explorer 8, 9 or 10? Your days are numbered Microsoft is killing support for those older browsers as of January Lance Whitney. Microsoft Microsoft is putting the kibosh on support for all versions of the Internet Explorer browser except for current version Discuss: Running Internet Explorer 8, 9 or 10?

Your days are numbered.