Subject: Proposal: Drop support for Internet Explorer

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 08:36:24 +0100

All,

Internet Explorer has long been superseded by Microsoft Edge, and even that
has recently moved to using Chromium as it's core engine. Version 11 was
originally released in 2013, and though Microsoft have committed to
supporting it until 2025, as far as I can tell there have been no notable
new features in almost it's entire lifetime, and certainly in recent years
Microsoft have only been releasing security fixes.

As you can imagine, supporting Internet Explorer has a non-trivial cost to
it for the pgAdmin project. Not only do we need to test with it as well as
Edge, but we also need to write code, CSS and HTML that is fully compatible
with what essentially is a 7 year old browser. By comparison, for all
other browsers we typically aim to support releases no more than 2 years
old.

I therefore propose that we officially drop support for Internet Explorer.
Practically this means that we would not test with it, and anyone reporting
a bug with it would be told to use an alternate browser.

Objections/comments please?

Thanks!

-- 
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

---

From: Dave Caughey <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 07:41:44 -0400

Check the analytics... I think you'll find dropping it is a non-issue. In
my own web service, I found that IE (all versions) constituted only about
1% of my users.

So I dropped support for IE (since it was preventing me from fully adopting
ES6), and there was not a single complaint from my users.

Cheers,
Dave

On Tue., Apr. 7, 2020, 3:36 a.m. Dave Page, <[email-masked]> wrote:

> All,
>
> Internet Explorer has long been superseded by Microsoft Edge, and even
> that has recently moved to using Chromium as it's core engine. Version 11
> was originally released in 2013, and though Microsoft have committed to

---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 13:00:02 +0100

> my own web service, I found that IE (all versions) constituted only about

Good point - 1.9% of the visitors to the website were on IE this week. 1.8
of those were on IE11. We even had one hit from IE5...

By comparison, 72% of users were on Chrome, 13% on Firefox, with 5.5% each
for Safari and Edge.

>
> So I dropped support for IE (since it was preventing me from fully
> adopting ES6), and there was not a single complaint from my users.
>
> Cheers,
> Dave
>
>> As you can imagine, supporting Internet Explorer has a non-trivial cost
>> to it for the pgAdmin project. Not only do we need to test with it as well
>> as Edge, but we also need to write code, CSS and HTML that is fully
>> compatible with what essentially is a 7 year old browser. By comparison,
>> for all other browsers we typically aim to support releases no more than 2
>> years old.
>>
>> I therefore propose that we officially drop support for Internet
>> Explorer. Practically this means that we would not test with it, and anyone
>> reporting a bug with it would be told to use an alternate browser.
>>

---

From: richard coleman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 08:34:02 -0400

Dave,

Seeing that IE isn't standards compliant and not only is not being further
developed, but Microsoft is actively discouraging its use, it is probably
time to drop support for it.

I would caution *against* using browser analytics as any sort of proxy for
use.  Since pgAdmin 4 lacks a UI of its own, I rely on an instance of
Chromium (or Vivalidi, or Firefox, depending on the machine) to run pgAdmin
under.  In every case, the browser that I am *running* pgAdmin 4 under is
*not* the same browser that I use to browse websites, and so would never
show up in your analytics.

Just something to keep in mind,

rik.

---

From: Jack Royal-Gordon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 11:45:24 -0700

I’ve had a similar response from not supporting IE since about 2016. A couple users asked about it and had no problem when I told them we didn’t support it. Mostly, they switched to Chrome.

👍👍

> On Apr 7, 2020, at 4:41 AM, Dave Caughey <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Check the analytics... I think you'll find dropping it is a non-issue. In my own web service, I found that IE (all versions) constituted only about 1% of my users. 
> 
> So I dropped support for IE (since it was preventing me from fully adopting ES6), and there was not a single complaint from my users. 
> 
> Cheers, 
> Dave
> 
> On Tue., Apr. 7, 2020, 3:36 a.m. Dave Page, <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> All,
> 
> Internet Explorer has long been superseded by Microsoft Edge, and even that has recently moved to using Chromium as it's core engine. Version 11 was originally released in 2013, and though Microsoft have committed to supporting it until 2025, as far as I can tell there have been no notable new features in almost it's entire lifetime, and certainly in recent years Microsoft have only been releasing security fixes.
> 
> As you can imagine, supporting Internet Explorer has a non-trivial cost to it for the pgAdmin project. Not only do we need to test with it as well as Edge, but we also need to write code, CSS and HTML that is fully compatible with what essentially is a 7 year old browser. By comparison, for all other browsers we typically aim to support releases no more than 2 years old.
> 
> I therefore propose that we officially drop support for Internet Explorer. Practically this means that we would not test with it, and anyone reporting a bug with it would be told to use an alternate browser.
> 
> Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com <http://pgsnake.blogspot.com/>
> Twitter: @pgsnake
> 
> EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com <http://www.enterprisedb.com/>

---

From: Ken Benson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 19:06:16 +0000

From: Jack Royal-Gordon <[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 7, 2020 11:45 AM
To: Dave Caughey <[email-masked]>
Cc: Dave Page <[email-masked]>; pgAdmin Support <[email-masked]>; pgadmin-hackers <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Proposal: Drop support for Internet Explorer

👍👍

On Apr 7, 2020, at 4:41 AM, Dave Caughey <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:

Cheers,
Dave
On Tue., Apr. 7, 2020, 3:36 a.m. Dave Page, <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
All,

Thanks!
[Ken Benson]
The only caution is – I’ve recently (within the past several months) dealt with clients that are locked into IE11 – as a corporate rule.
Ken Benson | ken @ infowerks-dot-com

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com<http://pgsnake.blogspot.com/>
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com<http://www.enterprisedb.com/>
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2020 09:17:00 +0100

> show up in your analytics.

Understood. Analytics are just one source of information, and certainly not
conclusive as you point out. My suspicion is that your situation is not the
norm for most people, but that really is just a suspicion.

>>> Check the analytics... I think you'll find dropping it is a non-issue.
>>> In my own web service, I found that IE (all versions) constituted only
>>> about 1% of my users.
>>>
>>
>> Good point - 1.9% of the visitors to the website were on IE this week.
>> 1.8 of those were on IE11. We even had one hit from IE5...
>>
>> By comparison, 72% of users were on Chrome, 13% on Firefox, with 5.5%
>> each for Safari and Edge.
>>
>>
>>>

---

From: Darren Duncan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2020 16:26:40 -0700

If its hard to know how many people are actually using Internet Explorer:

You could make the next release of pgAdmin display a message occasionally to 
users of Internet Explorer saying that Internet Explorer will no longer be 
officially supported in a future version, and when that version comes the 
message says now no longer supported.

You can then see how many people contact you about this to express concern.

-- Darren Duncan

---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2020 12:36:20 +0100

Hi

> You can then see how many people contact you about this to express concern.

Good idea. I've hacked up a patch to warn users if they're using a
deprecated or unsupported browser.

CCing Akshay for a review :-)

---

From: Darren Duncan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2020 11:26:58 -0700

The patch looks good as much as I understand it, but this raises an important 
question:

How should one best handle minority browsers that may be completely modern but 
you may not specifically know about them?  Such as the newer crop of browsers 
that emphasize stronger privacy or may have fewer identifiers?

While going on a whitelist as the patch essentially does for known good browsers 
is conservative, I feel that an alteration would be good.

I propose dividing the browsers/environments into 3 categories, which are 
recognized-supported, recognized-unsupported, and unrecognized.

So the unsupported older versions of supported browsers get a stronger message 
encouraging a browser switch as they are recognized as unsupported, while 
unrecognized browsers get a different weaker message saying they weren't 
recognized so we can't determine if they'd work; both can point to the list of 
known supported browsers.

Related to this, there could be an application toggle that affects the 
unrecognized category where users can basically say, yes I understand you don't 
recognize this browser, please hide the warning, or something like that.

Also, it probably goes without saying, but the code/templates will need to be 
structured in such a way that the warning message uses about plain as possible 
HTML so that if the browser doesn't support displaying the UI in general it can 
at least display the message.

-- Darren Duncan

On 2020-04-09 4:36 a.m., Dave Page wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 12:26 AM Darren Duncan wrote:
> 
> Good idea. I've hacked up a patch to warn users if they're using a deprecated or 
> unsupported browser.
>

---

From: Khushboo Vashi <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2020 09:37:23 +0530

> I do agree with this suggestion.

---

From: Bill Evans <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2020 07:07:22 -0700

It is not doing people a favor to help them continue to use an unsupported browser that no longer receives security updates. 

Sent from my iPad

On Apr 8, 2020, at 4:26 PM, Darren Duncan <[email-masked]> wrote:

You could make the next release of pgAdmin display a message occasionally to users of Internet Explorer saying that Internet Explorer will no longer be officially supported in a future version, and when that version comes the message says now no longer supported.

-- Darren Duncan

---

From: Doug Reed <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2020 11:04:59 -0400

All,

Just my two cents.  I am the CTO of CirrusPoint Solutions.  We have an
Enterprise level Browser-based application that is used by very large
corporations as a network management and reporting dashboard. These huge
companies are almost always heavily Microsoft focused, and slow to
upgrade.  Everyone has I.E. on their desktop, and are notorious for forcing
companies to conform to their whims and support stuff that belonged in the
trash years ago.

We "officially" dropped support for I.E. when we replaced Flash with HTML5
<YEARS> ago. There was almost no resistance at all.  Corporate IT just
installed Chrome, or Firefox on users desktops and moved on.  Everyone
knows that I.E. is not HTML5 compliant, and it kind-of works, but sometimes
doesn't. In my experience, the only one still using I.E. is the CTO who
doesn't know how to turn his computer on, and his secretary comes in and
shows him how to start Chrome and that's the end of it.

I can remember only getting one complaint from anyone ever, and when I
explained that Internet Explorer was written in a time before the Internet
had standards, and now it doesn't work right any more, he switched to
Chrome and was good with it.

On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 10:07 AM Bill Evans <[email-masked]> wrote:

> It is not doing people a favor to help them continue to use an unsupported
> browser that no longer receives security updates.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> You could make the next release of pgAdmin display a message occasionally
> to users of Internet Explorer saying that Internet Explorer will no longer
> be officially supported in a future version, and when that version comes
> the message says now no longer supported.
>

-- 
Regards,

Doug

---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2020 14:23:37 +0100

Here's an updated patch that gives a slightly different message if the
browser is unknown vs. unsupported/deprecated. As with the previous patch,
the check can be disabled in the config.

---

From: Neel Patel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2020 20:15:12 +0530

Hi Dave,

Looks like patch is missing in attachment.

Thanks,
Neel Patel

---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2020 15:46:56 +0100

Ooops. Thanks for catching that. Here it is.

---

From: Akshay Joshi <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2020 21:17:55 +0530

Thanks, patch applied.

-- 
*Thanks & Regards*
*Akshay Joshi*

*Sr. Software Architect*
*EnterpriseDB Software India Private Limited*
*Mobile: +91 976-788-8246*

---

From: Darren Duncan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2020 10:51:17 -0700

You have a typo `elif browser != 'chrom'` but otherwise I see no problems with 
the patch, thank you. -- Darren Duncan

On 2020-04-14 7:46 a.m., Dave Page wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 3:45 PM Neel Patel <[email-masked] 
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi Dave,
> 
>     On Tue 14 Apr, 2020, 6:53 PM Dave Page, <[email-masked]
>     <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> 
>         browser is unknown vs. unsupported/deprecated. As with the previous
>         patch, the check can be disabled in the config.
> 
>         On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 5:07 AM Khushboo Vashi
>         <[email-masked]
>         <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>             On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 11:57 PM Darren Duncan
>             <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>

---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2020 21:07:17 +0100

> the patch, thank you. -- Darren Duncan

Well spotted. That was an intentional testing artefact (deliberating
causing Chrome to not be recognised), but Akshay also spotted it before
committing:-)

> >                 The patch looks good as much as I understand it, but
> this raises
> >                 an important
> >                 question:
> >
> >                 you may not specifically know about them?  Such as the
> newer
> >                 crop of browsers
> >                 While going on a whitelist as the patch essentially does
> for
> >                 known good browsers
> >                 I propose dividing the browsers/environments into 3
> categories,
> >                 which are
> >                 So the unsupported older versions of supported browsers
> get a
> >                 stronger message
> >                 unrecognized browsers get a different weaker message
> saying they
> >                 weren't
> >                 recognized so we can't determine if they'd work; both
> can point
> >                 to the list of
> >                 Related to this, there could be an application toggle
> that
> >                 affects the
> >                 unrecognized category where users can basically say, yes
> I
> >                 understand you don't
> >                 recognize this browser, please hide the warning, or
> something
> >                 like that.
> >
> >                 Also, it probably goes without saying, but the
> code/templates
> >                 will need to be
> >                 structured in such a way that the warning message uses
> about
> >                 plain as possible
> >                 HTML so that if the browser doesn't support displaying
> the UI in
> >                 general it can
> >                  >     If its hard to know how many people are actually
> using
> >                 Internet Explorer:
> >                  >
> >                  >     You could make the next release of pgAdmin
> display a
> >                 message occasionally to
> >                  >     users of Internet Explorer saying that Internet
> Explorer
> >                 will no longer be
> >                  >     officially supported in a future version, and
> when that
> >                 version comes the
> >                  >     You can then see how many people contact you
> about this
> >                 to express concern.
> >                  >
> >                  >
> >                  > Good idea. I've hacked up a patch to warn users if
> they're
> >                 using a deprecated or
> >                  > unsupported browser.
> >                  >
-- 
Dave Page
https://pgsnake.blogspot.com

EDB Postgres
https://www.enterprisedb.com