Guidelines for ancient browser support: IE

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WordPress still officially supports IE 11, and will likely have to continue support for it for a while. But there is not a huge amount of people using it anymore, and there’s some indication that quite a few of the people still using it may be screen reader users.

On the other hand, there are lots of new-ish features, particularly in CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets., that it would be very useful to start exploring.

A graceful degradation approach might be the best way to allow WordPress to leverage the potential of new tech, without ruining the experience for those who still rely on legacy browsers. But how to go about adopting this approach?

Graceful degradation ensures essential functionality is still available for IE users, and features lacking IE support are used only for enhancements. What is essential is not always obvious though, so it would be good to agree on some rules for how to go about this.

I’ve created a Trac ticket for this task. It would be lovely to get some discussion going on this, either there or here!

Bob Easton 9:39 am on March 27, 2020

“But there is not a huge amount of people using…”
People can be counted. We use the word “amount” for things not easily counted, as in measuring a gallon of gasoline or a cup of sugar. For things that can be counted we use the construct “number of.” … “But there is not a huge number of people using…”
Jonathan Desrosiers 8:58 pm on March 27, 2020
Here are some posts from the original discussion and decision to change the minimum version of IE supported to where it is today (IE 11):
- Original exploration: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/02/28/the-new-editor-and-browser-support/
- Continued Discussion: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/03/13/continued-discussion-on-browser-support/
- Decision: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/04/23/target-browser-coverage/
Also, where the handbook mentions browser support: https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/best-practices/browser-support/

Can you clarify what would be considered a legacy browser? Are we only talking IE 11? It may also help to get some more recent usage numbers for IE 11 to understand the number of people we are trying to support. I would bet that a lot of financial and banking industry users are still limited to only IE 11.

If the experience in older browsers can be improved by utilizing a better approach that degrades more gracefully, I’m all for it. But I worry about putting too much effort into supporting really old browsers.
- tellthemachines 5:33 am on March 31, 2020
  
  To be clear, I’m referring to support for IE11 only.
  
  As for usage numbers, there’s some info in this comment and here’s the WebAIM screen reader survey, which shows there are still quite a few screen reader users on IE.
  
  I don’t doubt we’ll have to continue to support IE11 for a while; what I intend with the post and the TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. is to establish some rules around how we can use features unsupported by IE without breaking anything major for its users.
Chuckie 8:21 pm on March 30, 2020

I sometimes use IE 11. Mainly Opera. But my CHtmlView in my software uses the IE Engine so I have no choice. If IE 11 comes with Windows 10 then it should be supported IMHO.

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