Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.Discussion opener:
I am strongly considering removing default support for IE8. This old browser is holding us back and I need to write shed loads of code to make the newer advanced approaches work, or (as i have done for the interim) simply bash the user with ie9.js and other workarounds (html5 shim etc).
Right now the CSS is rather bloated because I use rems for font sizing, padding, margin etc and I must provide px fallbacks for IE8 in order to do this. IMO rem is too useful to not use, it completely mitigates all those nasty inheritance issues of em and makes theming easier.
So:
1) Zurb Foundation afaict has dropped IE8
2) Google is dropping IE8 support, most notably in Gmail.
3) IE8 support (from Microsoft) ends this month.
4) Drupal core itself seems set on not supporting IE8 at all.
However:
1) The china issue (around 22% at time of writing, dropping).
2) Worldwide IE8 still has about 10% usage but it's dropping, in the EU /Australia/USA its less than 5% and dropping quick.
I am on the fence on this one - I like having legacy support in general, however even I am balking at serious support for IE8, if I can make things degrade gracefully I would be happy with that, but that means px fallbacks or a sort of "works but is really ugly" sort of fallback.
Mechanisms to provide toggle switches or variables to provide IE8 support are possible, such as when using SASS/Compass - I could get behind the idea of supporting this.
Right now the layouts work in IE8 only because of ie9.js, so we could keep it and at least provide a layout with whatever styles are working so the site works, but not pretty (the before mentioned ugly fallback method).
I note with interest many sites not only dropping support for IE8 but in fact locking users out until they upgrade their browser, this is an interesting turn of events on the web and clearly indicating that many others are no longer prepared to wear the overhead costs of supporting graceful degradation (it costs).
Comments
Comment #1
Pablo Romero CreditAttribution: Pablo Romero commentedMy 2 cents: I'm all for removing it.
The main reason is your 4th point: Drupal 8 itself does not support IE8 any more. So I see no reason to support it in 8x branch of AT.
Besides that, I see many advantages for you (no more IE8 headaches) and us (less/smaller files and options).
I stopped using respond.js and other IE8 tweaks some time ago. I honestly think it's about time to move forward in this matter. Those remaining Windows XP users
canshould install any other browser for free.Comment #2
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedIndeed, Drupal core upgraded to jQuery 2, which does not support IE8, in fact you get a JS error if you try to use IE8 and log in, or use a script that requires jQuery, the site will still run but with "errors".
I have been nice and added a feature that allows you to turn on respond.js and selectivizr, which also calls the YUI3 lib to run selectivizr since it won't run in IE8 on jQuery. These polyfills are all turned OFF by default, but allows users who really must afford layout to IE8 users, since the theme uses media queries and lots of CSS3 selectors.
I've done some testing in IE8, it does mostly work (like 99%), at least the site is not a wreak, it's usable and for the most part looks the same with those polyfills turned on, if you turn them off it still looks pretty much the same, except all in one column.
You are right, it is time to move on, IE8 usage is now really low.