Leaflet: Consider dropping support for IE8

Created on 16 Apr 2018 · 7Comments · Source: Leaflet/Leaflet

I think it's really time to discuss dropping support for IE8, and also possibly 9 and 10. These browsers are supported by few web sites these days, and for users who really need to support them, we can point to older versions of Leaflet.

Maintaining support for olders IE versions is a pain, and it appears we rarely test it anyway (we broke IE8 in a previous release without noticing and nobody really told us).

needs discussion

Source

perliedman

👍17

Most helpful comment

I had a look at the openstreetmap.org statistics at the request of @IvanSanchez and our numbers for yesterday are:

IE 11: 9% (11128 visitors)
IE 10: 0.1% (99 visitors)
IE 9: 0.2% (198 visitors)
IE 8: 0% (4 visitors)
IE 6: 0% (2 visitors)

I suspect anything before IE9 barely works other parts of the site anyway, if it's actually functional at all.

tomhughes on 18 Apr 2018

👍9

All 7 comments

Some discussion on our IE support in this thread: #4745.

perliedman on 16 Apr 2018

I guess it's time to run this informal poll again?

IvanSanchez on 16 Apr 2018

I'm up for dropping IE8 support, and agree that we can just offer older versions of Leaflet for people who need to support it. Even jQuery no longer supports that version (https://jquery.com/browser-support/), so people using such a browser should expect the majority of the web to be mostly broken.

We should consider dropping support for IE9 and IE10 too. I just fetched the latest data from http://gs.statcounter.com/ and the breakdown is as follows:

IE 11: 2.7%
IE 10: 0.11%
IE 9: 0.11%
IE 8: 0.17%

All the IE8–10 values dropped by 2x in the last year.

mourner on 17 Apr 2018

👍7

I had a look at the openstreetmap.org statistics at the request of @IvanSanchez and our numbers for yesterday are:

IE 11: 9% (11128 visitors)
IE 10: 0.1% (99 visitors)
IE 9: 0.2% (198 visitors)
IE 8: 0% (4 visitors)
IE 6: 0% (2 visitors)

I suspect anything before IE9 barely works other parts of the site anyway, if it's actually functional at all.

tomhughes on 18 Apr 2018

👍9

True ancient warriors. So brave : "IE 6: 0% (2 visitors)". :grinning:
Released on March 22, 2001.

BobbyBabes on 24 Apr 2018

😄2

I vote for dropping everything below IE11.

codeofsumit on 17 Jun 2018

👍6

Pinging @mourner because I think a year and a half later it may be time to again discuss this and come to a conclusion?

Edit: Maybe it's also worth discussion dropping support for Safari except the last two versions and Opera (as it has been chromium based for a long time now - same may be valid for Edge Legacy but I think that should be supported until MS decides what to do with it)