Stuck on an issue?

Lightrun Answers was designed to reduce the constant googling that comes with debugging 3rd party libraries. It collects links to all the places you might be looking at while hunting down a tough bug.

And, if you’re still stuck at the end, we’re happy to hop on a call to see how we can help out.

Drop support for IE11

See original GitHub issue

This is a tracking issue to discuss what it would look like for Wagtail to drop its support for IE11.

Edit: November 2020 update. We are now through the process of gradually removing support for IE11.

Edit: September 2020 update. As of September 2020, we intend to gradually remove support for IE11 over the coming Wagtail releases. If this is something you rely on we would love to hear from you.

~As of June 2020 there are no short-term plans to remove support, but if this is something you rely on we would love to hear from you.~

This is prompted by a similar change to the Django admin – view Django 3.1’s release notes. Although I assume the Django admin might still work mostly as expected in IE11, it’s a good milestone for us to pay attention to, and feels like a good time for us to start planning for this in Wagtail.

Particularly, it would be great to hear from people who do rely on IE11 in their organisation, as the cost of supporting IE11 is pretty clear, while the benefits aren’t always so apparent. If you’re in this situation please take a moment to describe your situation – which Wagtail version you’re using, why you’re still using IE11, whether there are alternatives available, and what’s your plan with other suppliers/technologies dropping support.

Relevant issues & implementation details

Known bugs

Potential improvements

#6107 some of the implementation options would require more work for IE11 support
#1240 could switch to logical properties for RTL styles
#2943 could start using CSS variables for easy theming
#6130 could remove .woff font files
#3804 Would speed up code reviews
#6059 We might be able to set up Prettier on the whole codebase, with ES2017 function parameter trailing commas for un-compiled code too.
#5015 could use CSS grid and flexbox as part of our refactoring.
Could reduce our static files’ size by switching to compiling JS for only the browser support we need.
Could start loading Wagtail’s JS code as ES modules, with asynchronous loading, without having to polyfill / compile this.
JS polyfills we include are only needed for IE11 support
We could likely remove Modernizr (might be able to do this already regardless)

Tech debt cleanup

GitHub search for “IE11”
Remove legacy IE conditional comments (can do this regardless)

IE11 market share

As of May 2020, IE has a 1.4% market share in Europe according to statcounter’s data. caniuse’s usage table has IE11 at 1.42% globally (same underlying data source). Update September 2020: 1.2% Update February 2021: 0.7%.