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Time Talks Against IE8 Support for Drupal 8

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Yesterday I published the Why not Drop IE8 support for Drupal 8? post and it got some really great feedback in the comments. Thanks for that, its always nice to hear good arguments as well as tips of where to find more information about something.

In this post I would like to follow up on those comments. First though lets start with a look at the market share Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) has and how it has developed from its height in April last year.

The IE8 Market Share Decline

Note that I have disabled the lines for Firefox and Google Chrome to make the graph easier to read. If you want to see those, just go to the StatCounter page I took the screenshot from. Also, the stats do not take into account if multiple browsers are installed/used on the same computer or not.

Since it height, IE8 has dropped a whopping 17% in the last 18 months, from 30% to 13%. Much of that has been taken by IE9 as seen in this graph. Not all though as IE has lost a few percents of its combined market share, particularly to Google Chrome.

What’s interesting though is to try and predict where it will be in two years time when we can assume that Drupal 8 is likely to be mature enough to build more complex and bigger sites with. The decline is definitely going to continue. Here are a few important things that is likely to affect it:

With these things happening already now and the end for XP in 18 months, we will see a lot more companies announcing they are dropping support for IE8 and make modern HTML5 browsers the ones they develop their sites and tools for.

I think its safe to say that by the time Drupal 8 is mature, the IE8 market share will be very small. Personally I would be very surprised if its over 1% of the computers where it is the only browser installed.

Organization Lock-In to IE8

As several pointed out in the comments to my post yesterday, there are organizations with legacy systems requiring a specific browser, or has rules about that a certain browser can only be used on its computers.

For them, this problem will only occur if they are still stuck on Windows XP in two years from now and then Microsoft has stopped supporting it. Even so, they still have a choice of installing Firefox, Chrome and Opera as a second browser. Then they can still use IE8 for their legacy apps and anyone of the other three for everything else.

I have a hard time seeing how any organizations can be productive stuck on IE8 only in two years time. Large parts of the web will simply have an awful UX for them, in many cases not work at all. If they didn’t learn their lesson when they locked themselves to IE6, they will never learn.

How Could IE8 Support Affect Drupal 8

Larry Garfield (Crell) points out in a comment that there isn’t actually much in Drupal 8 that is IE8 specific and the cost of supporting it wouldn’t be that hard. Its also worth pointing out that some HTML5 stuff degrades OKish when viewed in a non HTML5 browser. It still works, just don’t look as nice.

However, if Drupal 8 will officially support IE8 it means that it needs to be taken into consideration and also tested against its functionality as well as all improvements done to it in point releases. Where will we then draw the line for what in core that also must work correctly in IE8? What about the more advanced and cool stuff such as Canvas as Chris Weber points out in his comment?

I’m not even on the same planet as Larry and Chris when it comes to the technical bits and requirements around this. But, the solutions I have seen to get things working in IE8 is in my view mostly workarounds. That is a word I am not particularly fond of when it comes to technology. In my experience, workarounds will in almost every case mean that the problem is still there and will make the maintainability more demanding, as well as add a lot of extra work when adding new functionality.

Thus, if Drupal 8 is released with official support for IE8, then that support will have to be maintained during its lifetime. Considering that Drupal is a market leader and are today running millions of websites, decisions such as these will have long term effects. Organizations investing their future web presence on Drupal would want to know it is a safe bet and that no future surprises will happen.

Support IE8, Just Not Official Please

I am not against supporting legacy browser, but I don’t want to see Drupal 8 risk getting restricted and also require unnecessary resources to maintain and develop due to that it has official support for IE8. If we really need IE8 support in there we must make sure it does not put a restraining jacket on all the cool stuff HTML5/CSS3 promises.

Would it for example be possible to restrict the IE8 workarounds to only exist in themes? Or a special IE8 compatibility module that is not enabled by default?

If so, then the support will limited to that and not restrict Drupal 8 to take full advantage of what modern browsers and mobile devices needs.

Most importantly, we can avoid the official supported stamp and all the negatives that means!

Here are a few good Drupal 8.x Core links to drupal.org about this topic that Cameron Eagans posted in this comment:

For me, nothing points to that IE8 will be anything but dead in two years time. Very few will be stuck on it as the only browser they can use. So lets get rid of locking us to the last bad legacy that IE8 is.

So far I have seen absolutely no good reasons to keep it.

Just the opposite!

Thomas SvensonI'm curious about everything and a believer in an open, transparent & collaborative world. I'm also a geek and nerd that is totally convinced technology used right is what will allow us to build a more sustainable world - A future with a much better life experience for everyone. My goal in life is to help make that happen.

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