Goodbye IE 8–9 👋

[Thomas Broyer]

Fwiw, a change in GWT emulation of longBitsToDouble and doubleBitsToLong (https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23140) has landed that uses Typed Arrays. This means they won't work in IE8 and IE9 anymore: https://caniuse.com/typedarrays

Maybe it's time to remove support for those old versions? (it's long overdue if you ask me)

I'd actually go as far as only keeping IE11 for the time being (which uses the gecko1_8 permutation).

A first step might be to disable them by default, like we did for the ie6 and opera permutations in 2.6, removed in 2.7.

Fwiw, for a while now, gwt-maven-archetypes has had <set-property name="user.agent" value="ie10,gecko1_8,safari" /> (i.e. it already disabled ie8 and ie9), and I'll change it to gecko1_8,safari soon.

[Goktug Gokdogan]

I highly recommend dropping IE11 as well in the next release. It will be no longer supported by Microsoft and GMail and Google Workspace will be dropping its support in March 15:

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2020/12/ending-support-for-ie11-for-all-google-workspace.html

That means internally we will stop testing and developing for it and things may start breaking over time.

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[Matt Davis]

I can't see an argument for keeping any IE version supported with both microsoft and google dropping support.  Hopefully dropping support would also allow some optimizations or simplifications. Internally, we were planning on supporting IE11 until microsoft dropped support and forced the issue.

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[Jens]

Dropping IE 8-10 shouldn't really hurt. Companies that require it are probably not upgrading GWT in a fast pace anyways.

However I wouldn't drop IE 11 anytime soon. IE 11 itself is tied to the lifecycle of Microsoft's operating systems, which means for Windows 10 it is supported until 2025 (for now). So just because MS and Google drop support for IE 11 in some/all of their products, the browser itself is still generally supported by MS. So we should think twice before removing IE 11 from a library such as GWT, even if it means to decline/revert certain commits if they break IE 11. From own experience I have usually seen something around 8% of IE 11 usage in GWT based apps.

However I am pretty sure more and more companies will announce dropping IE 11 this year or next year. With MS and Google starting, this could easily have a domino effect. However GWT also also strongly used internally inside companies so it might not have that much of an effect in that area.

If we ditch IE 8-10 and only leaving gecko1_8 and safari, can't we kill them both as well and put them together? Are there so many differences in code between both? From my work migrating GWT code to elemental2/JsInterop I had the feeling that only some minor stuff is different between both. So there shouldn't be that much overhead in code size and performance doing (cached) runtime checks instead.

-- J.

[Tony BenBrahim]

IE 11 is still widely used inside corporations, because it is the only browser that supports Java applets, and applications such as Oracle e-Business Suite still use applets extensively (for Oracle forms). While that segment does not move very fast, it does not mean other unrelated groups within the same corporation are not updating GWT regularly. It is hard to generalize In a multinational company  with tens of thousands of employees.

Regards

Tony

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[bernhar...@schubec.com]

Hi all!

I think IE11 support should be dropped soon if it blocks (or makes it difficult) to implement new features in the next version of GWT.

I understand, that there are enterprises who still use IE11 internally, but developers who service such enterprises should use the current version of GWT, which is not going away. Nobody is forced to upgrade to the next version of GWT.

Thanks,

Berni 

[David Nouls]

We still need IE11 support in the banking sector. We still have a majority of customers that use IE11 due to technical reasons (plugins needed for accessing secure token don’t install properly in Chrome without internet access amongst others).

What do you mean with “next version of GWT” if that is 3.x then I don’t care at this point. We have been waiting for that release for a few years now. But 2.x releases should not drop IE11 support it is supposed to be a long-term supported version.

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[Colin Alworth]

I've just filed https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/issues/9739, where a workaround exists in java.util.Date that nearly doubles the time it takes to parse date strings and build date objects. This workaround exists for IE8 and IE9, as all more recent browsers implement the same behavior as we already would expect. Dropping support for those two browsers would simplify the code required here

From the age of this thread and the discussion so far, it sounds like there is interest in keeping IE11 still, but no one has spoke up about IE10 or below.

Additionally, java.util.Random emulation was changed to require Date.now(), which isn't available in IE8, so neither GWT 2.8.2 nor GWT 2.9.0 are apparently compatible with IE8 anyway, at least in this small way. This should give us some confidence (along with the lack of opposition in this thread) that at least IE8 is definitely safe to drop.

So, is there any objection at this time to dropping what remains of IE8, IE9, and IE10 support from GWT? Then, we can reevaluate IE11 at some later date, for GWT itself? Various migrated GWT modules have focused their efforts on well-supported browsers, and are likely to only support IE11 by accident anyway.

[Colin Alworth]

Note that it appears I'm mistaken, Runtime.java polyfilled Date.now() (though code in JsDate and others still believed that this method might not exist), so GWT 2.8.2 and 2.9.0 likely function properly in IE8.

[Vegegoku]

I vote to even drop support for IE11. 

[Juan Pablo Gardella]

+1 drop IE 11 increases the effort to include new stuff. IE +11 can still use GWT 2.9.0

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[Matt Davis]

+1 drop all i.e.

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[David Nouls]

+1 for dropping support for ie8-10.

We still need to support IE11 in our app right now. But not for much longer. We are currently still compiling with 2.8.2 due to compilation issues with the 2.9 release (issues with generics) so dropping IE11 is not a big issue as well.

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[miha...@gmail.com]

My preference would still be to keep IE11, for one more year, if possible.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/05/19/the-future-of-internet-explorer-on-windows-10-is-in-microsoft-edge/
MS official suport ends on June 15, 2022.

Is there some new feature to be added, into GWT core that require removal of IE11?

+1 removal of  ie8-10.
+1 deprecate ie11 for gwt 2.10

On Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 7:49:56 PM UTC+3 nilo...@gmail.com wrote:

[mcmi...@gmail.com]

+1 for remove IE

If really needed deprecate IE11 elso drop full IE versions

[Alberto Mancini]

+1 for dropping support for all IE versions.

Thanks. 

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[Manfred Tremmel]

Am Donnerstag, 30. September 2021, 18:49:56 CEST schrieb Colin Alworth:

> So, is there any objection at this time to dropping what remains of IE8,
> IE9, and IE10 support from GWT? Then, we can reevaluate IE11 at some later
> date, for GWT itself? Various migrated GWT modules have focused their
> efforts on well-supported browsers, and are likely to only support IE11 by
> accident anyway.

Let's drop the IE-Permutations. IE11 uses the gecko permutation, so no need to
drop it. In my newer projects, I only use safari permutation for all browsers,
so even dropping all browser specific permutations wouldn't affect me.

[Jens]

I think the gecko permutation has very little to no special treatment of IE 11 and there are some bugs reported because of that. So there isn't much to deprecated for IE 11. 

Personally I only use safari, gecko permutation and define safari as fallback permutation. In addition I use some code to check runtime vs compile time user agent and if they are different display a warning that some things might not work. That warning basically triggers for any exotic user-agent and any IE below 11.

Dropping all IE permutations (8-10) should be totally fine I guess. Especially because the new, smaller GWT modules only care about IE 11 (if at all). gwt-dom for example has only two checks for safari and everything else is treated the same.

-- J.

[Rocco De Angelis]

+1 for dropping support for all IE versions (8-10)

[Colin Alworth]

I've gone ahead and submitted the patches for this work, and have a build available (either for maven or just a plain zip download) to test this out, along with other features. I only removed explicit references to IE8, 9, and 10, as some other code was a bit vague in how it might be used. As IE11 is still technically supported for a while, and as it behaves as though it is a firefox permutation from GWT's perspective, I didn't put any effort at this time into removing it.

There are two prerequisite merges that have to happen for this to land:

• First we need to update the gwt apichecker reference jars https://github.com/gwtproject/tools/pull/22
• Next, we need to update GWT to use these new reference jars, and account for some api changes since 2.9 that already exist https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23680

Once those are merged, IE 8/9/10 can be removed https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23760

As a follow-up, java.util.Date can be substantially more efficient in both gwt and j2cl https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23761

See https://github.com/niloc132/gwt/actions/runs/1369212299 for build log and artifacts of only these patches. For maven artifacts, use the https://repo.vertispan.com/gwt-snapshot/ repository, and specify gwt version 2.10.0-htmlunit-upgrade-SNAPSHOT, this build contains other fixes as well such as dropping Java7 support, upgrading to latest Jetty 9, and upgrading to latest htmlunit.

Community reviewers who have the ability to approve/+2 patches don't seem to be available right now, so I request that anyone who tries out these patches or builds also look through the code and give a +1 comment or review at the links above. I've received private confirmation from several individuals and teams that these patches work as expected, but comments to that effect on the patches will help to move this forward.