Backwards compatibility. Apparently there are still some people stuck on IE11. It's nice that jQuery still supports those users and the products that they are still running.
> We also dropped support for other very old browsers, including Edge Legacy, iOS versions earlier than the last 3, Firefox versions earlier than the last 2 (aside from Firefox ESR), and Android Browser.
Safari from iOS 16, released in 2022, is more modern in every conceivable way than MSIE 11. I'd also bet there are more people stuck with iOS 16- than those who can only use IE 11, except maybe at companies with horrid IT departments, in which case I kind of see this as enabling them to continue to suck.
I'd vote to rip the bandaid off. MSIE is dead tech, deader than some of the other browsers they're deprecating. Let it fade into ignomony as soon as possible.
“Support” here probably means “we’re testing jQuery for compatibility on those web browsers” - likely Safari from iOS 16 still runs this version of jQuery just fine. However, running automated test suites or support bugfixing for those clients is a lot harder than spinning up some Microsoft-provided VM with IE11 on it.
There are a lot of intranet web applications that require IE, and IE is still in support by Microsoft. Even on Windows 11 Edge still has IE Mode for that reason. IPhones stuck on older iOS version by definition aren’t supported by Apple anymore.
> There are likely to be no devices running iOS 16
My iPhone X is stuck on iOS 16 with no way to upgrade.
However, the phone is still working well. Despite being in daily use for 8 years it still has 81% battery capacity, has never been dropped, has a great OLED screen, can record 4K@60 video. It is far more responsive than a brand new 2025 $200 Android phone from e.g. Xiaomi. It still gets security patches from Apple. The only real shortcoming compared to a modern iPhone is the low light camera performance. That and some app developers don't support iOS 16 anymore, so e.g. I can't use the ChatGPT app and have to use it via the browser, but the Gemini app works fine.
I visited a distillery in 2020. Their machines were managed by HP laptops running Windows XP. Those machines and those laptops and that Windows XP are probably still there with their old IE browser.
They will probably be there for as long as the capacitors last, but the critical thing is that they are almost certainly running some Win32 industrial process software with no need for web browsers or for that matter even Internet connectivity. In fact I hope they’re not on wifi given the state of legacy WinXP security!
There are some really retrograde government and bigcorps, running ten year old infrastructure. And if that is your customer-base? You do it. Plus I worked on a consumer launch site for something you might remember, and we got the late requirement for IE7 support, because that's what the executives in Japan had. No customers cared, but yeah it worked in IE7.
Oh, certainly, corporations run ten-year-old software. But for the record, IE 11 turns 13 this year [1]. Which makes it somewhat more surprising to me.
My reading is that they’ll support Edge’s IE 11 compatibility mode until then, but that IE 11 is already EOLed except for a couple of extremely niche enterprise versions.
I think anything still using ActiveX like stuff or "native" things. Sure, it should all be dead and gone, but some might not be and there is no path forward with any of that AFAIK.
Surely by this point someone has written a 0-day for MSIE 11 which gets root and silently installs an Internet Explorer skinned Chromium. If not, someone should get onto that. —Signed, everyone
