IE Support removed completely?

[mfeckie]

We use ember-shepherd in one of our applications and recently updated to the latest version of ember-shepherd.

Whilst doing so, I looked for breaking changes and so nothing in that repo.

When deployed we found that our IE11 users were unable to open our application.

It took quite some time to diagnose, but eventually I found that there were items in the transpiled / minified code which directly invoked the class keyword. I was able to track this back to Shepherd and eventually this PR #344

I wonder if there's a reason this breaking change didn't make it to the release notes for ember-shepherd or shepherd.

Is the removal of IE 11 support due to some technical problem with supporting it?

[RobbieTheWagner]

Hi @mfeckie, yes IE support was removed. Since Microsoft no longer supports IE, we removed it from the browserlist. That being said, I believe it can be used with IE by manually using babel to transpile for IE.

[RobbieTheWagner]

The breaking change is listed in the CHANGELOG here for Shepherd, but we probably should have put it in ember-shepherd too.

[mfeckie]

IE 11 is still 'supported' by Microsoft until end of life for windows 8.1, which looks to be a few more years 😭. It's the only reason we still have to support it.

https://medium.com/@burger.neal/the-end-of-life-of-internet-explorer-11-12736f9ff75f

[RobbieTheWagner]

That article also advocates for stopping supporting IE11, so companies will be forced to move away from IE 😉. Do you have a lot of users that actually use IE? I would be curious to hear more about this.

[mfeckie]

Yeah, I'd love to not support it!

The key issue for us is that many of our users are working on PCs in environments where they have little ability to change the software installed on their desktop. As such, 'demanding' an alternate browser can be a very significant challenge.

At last check, around 12% of our admin portal traffic comes via IE11. We've been able to abandon support for IE10 and 9.

I've forked ember Shepherd and we are now able to restore access by using a custom version which pins Shepherd to 2.4.

[RobbieTheWagner]

Rather than pinning, we should work together to provide docs on how to run Babel on Shepherd yourself, to support whatever browsers.

[mfeckie]

Happy to help out if you can point me to a starting place.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[danielgrana]

I have the same problem here. Many of our users are still forced to use IE11. They don't really have a choice since corporate cogs sometimes turn very slowly. So currently we also pin the version to 2.4. However would still love to update to a current version, even if I need to run Babel to build myself. Any starting point?

[RobbieTheWagner]

@mfeckie @danielgrana what are your build setups like? I believe if you use webpack, rollup, etc we can support this, but currently we cannot support it in Ember, until Embroider lands. With that in mind, it might be easier to add back support for IE11 to the whole library, and remove it again when Embroider drops and we can more easily support manually running babel.

[danielgrana]

since we need to support current but also legacy environments, but don't want to overload the global namespace, we're using browserify with a globally exposed object. I think browserify should be able to run babel. Would it be enough to add IE to browserslistrc and rebuild?

[mfeckie]

@rwwagner90 Our build setup is pretty much standard ember-cli + ember-cli-deploy

We've dealt with the issue by using a custom fork, but if you were to add back support for IE11, we'd switch back to master.

[RobbieTheWagner]

@danielgrana

since we need to support current but also legacy environments, but don't want to overload the global namespace, we're using browserify with a globally exposed object. I think browserify should be able to run babel. Would it be enough to add IE to browserslistrc and rebuild?

You should definitely have the browsers you want to support in browserslist, however I am not sure if that will be enough. I am going to try to add back IE support soon.

@mfeckie Ember unfortunately doesn't allow running babel on node modules, right now, but it should when embroider drops. I will try to add back support soon.

[RobbieTheWagner]

@danielgrana @mfeckie I just opened a PR to add back IE support. Can you guys try the ie-support branch and see if it works for you please?

[danielgrana]

2.8.0 in ie-support branch works again like a charm with IE11 - even better since adding the shepherd-popper class it no longer interferes with other tippyjs poppers! So double win :-)