Kendo-ui-core: Poll: Drop support for IE8, IE Enterprise Mode and more

[tsvetomir]

I'm submitting a ...

• Feature request. A poll actually.

Please, feel free to:

• Like it if you approve or would not be affected by this change
• Dislike it if your project(s) actively target IE8
• Comment on it for anything else

Current behavior

We currently support IE8 and IE Enterprise Mode (as long as it's compatible with IE8).
This holds us back in regards to language features, front-end capabilities and tooling support.

As a reminder, Microsoft has dropped support for IE8-10 on January 12, 2016.

Motivation or use case for changing the behavior?

Dropping support will allow us to discard some sizable chunks of code and to adopt new tooling.
Non-exhaustive list of the changes we'd be able to make:

• Drop support for VML in the Drawing API and DataViz components
• Utilize modern essentials such as Function.bind
• Modernize development environment to use transpilers and modules. This will have positive effect on code quality as well
• Switch to HTTPS across our online sites. No more protocol-relative URLs (//kendo.cdn.telerik.com/...) anywhere

Environment

• Kendo UI version: 2017 and beyond
• Browser: IE 8

[tsvetomir]

Bonus poll: Drop support for IE9 and 10

This would untie our hands for even more improvements. For example:

• Liberal use of flexbox
• ES5 features

[tsvetomir]

We decided to drop support for IE8 in the 2017 R1 release.

The transition will be "soft", i.e. we'll not intentionally break functionality. Instead we will not include support in newly developed features.

The affected areas from the change will be:

• The DataViz suite will drop support for IE8 / VML due to a recent refactoring
• The online demos will switch to HTTPS, making them inaccessible to IE8 due to its outdated security stack