Dropping support for IE 11

[Tim Jacomb]

Hello

I think it's time that we drop support for IE 11.

There's some really good background information for the why's and what's in the angular RFC:

https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/41840

Some useful reasons why:

- IE 11 was released in 2013 and has only received bug and security fixes since

- Office365 dropped support in August 2021

- Bootstrap 5 doesn't support it (I assume warnings-ng is already incompatible with IE 11)

- Official end of life is June 2022

- Difficulty of testing changes on it and we have no automated test coverage of it

This was last discussed in Nov 2019 (https://groups.google.com/g/jenkinsci-dev/c/TV_pLEah9B4)

I propose:

Drop IE support completely from the support table on https://www.jenkins.io/doc/administration/requirements/web-browsers/

When:

After the next LTS baseline cutoff, approx 1st February

Thoughts?

Thanks

Tim

[Gavin Mogan]

Absolutely on board with this. The fact that some companies decide to
keep this old legacy broken browser around shouldn't hold anyone else
back.

> Bootstrap 5 doesn't support it (I assume warnings-ng is already incompatible with IE 11)

Css not working is very different than javascript not working

> Drop IE support completely from the support table on https://www.jenkins.io/doc/administration/requirements/web-browsers/

I know I had to use my open source saucelabs account when I was
helping out with blueocean, its so hard to test these days.

Gavin

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[Oleg Nenashev]

I would suggest explicitly moving IE 11 to "Tier 3" for now until the official end of life, with explicit statement it is deprecated. It would have the same effect as removing it, because Tier 3 states that there're " No guarantees. We will accept patches, but only if they are low risk. This is the default unless a browser/version is listed below". Having explicit support tier would be useful for those users who look into migration.

I also suggest promoting Microsoft Edge to Tier 1 in the same patch 

IIUC with removal of IE 11 support we will be also able to cleanup all CSS style default hacks, right? If so, maybe dropping IE11 right away is justified

[Ullrich Hafner]

Yes, it makes sense to drop support (or use Tier 3). I’m also using JS features that do not work in IE. 

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[James Nord]

Given Edge is Chromium based would it make sense to promote that to tier 1

at the same time to leave a platform default browser with T1 comparability / support?

It's much less likely to be broken than Safari based on comparability charts.

As such I would have no issue dropping IE support should edge be promoted.

/James

[Tim Jacomb]

Fine to promote edge,

I don’t think IE should stay on any level.

It will get broken very quickly if we remove the compat we have added for it or stop enforcing PRs be compatible with it.

Realistically that’s unlikely to hit the LTS version till June so will match up with EOL anyway, but I don’t think we need to keep it there till then?

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[jn...@cloudbees.com]

The only issue I would have in early removal is if a plugin dropped compatability whilst it was still supported for a supported LTS version, that said we have no stake in what a plugin does or does not do.  So I guess I have no issue with dropping IE today and promoting Edge to T1.

it could make any backports harder to versions that still support IE (should they be needed for any security or regression, but that would be the same for any change) so I doubt it has any impact on this descision..

/James

[timja...@gmail.com]

PR raised,

see https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/4827

and preview:

https://deploy-preview-4827--jenkins-io-site-pr.netlify.app/doc/administration/requirements/web-browsers/

[Mark Waite]

Was discussed in governance meeting today and agreed that we should proceed.