Thread by @diervo

"If you don't drop IE11 you are perpetuating the madness!", "Kill IE11 support!" Having wasted months of my life making WC and Proxy's work on IE11 along with some crazy nasty bugs, I couldn't agree more! However a thread on why is not that simple, especially on enterprise: 👇

I work on the UI Platform cloud at Salesforce: We provide the UI foundation for many of our clouds and customers. I'm going to focus on our B2B Sales/Service platform since its the one where IE11 is still officially supported. 1/14

This is "Salesforce Classic" our ~20 year old UI that brought Salesforce to the big enterprise company that we are today. As you can see the UI looks a bit outdated and its "deprecated", still being used by many of our customer. This still works on IE6 :) 2/14

This is "Lightning Experience" the new UI that replaced Classic. We made it available ~5 years ago and the goal was to move all customers to this new UI. Given that 90% of them where still on IE11, we had no choice but to support it (at least had to functionally work). 3/14

As we transitioned to this new UI it was clear that IE11 will drag us down and we will have to invest non-trivial amount of dollars to support it for a while (dev, testing, perf, cases & bug fixes, ...), but we needed to give time to our customers to move 4/14

And the beginning we thought that was a matter of time that people migrated both to our new UI and as a consequence their browser, but we underestimated our own entreprise nature and the natural reluctance of changing and the inevitable slow pace of transition.
5/14

We had to invest tons of energy on 1) Proving why moving to the new UI was worth it 2) Create legal terms and agreements to force people to sign if they really wanted/needed to keep using IE11 despites some security and performance caveats. 6/14

But even after given them a more superior, more productive experience that entice them to upgrade their browser; even after preaching all downsides and long term issues of using IE11 and forcing them to sign special agreements, in general customer did not upgrade. Why? 7/14

After talking to a lot of customers, specially some at the executive level(CTOs and CIOs) from big and small companies there were a bunch of commonalities that emerged:

8/14

- If employees don't demand change for business reasons update always be deferred
- IT updates required $ budget planning for IT - business value proof again
- ActiveX and was still surprisingly a requirement...🤦‍♂️
- Changing default browser was still challenging on windows
9/14

Couple of years ago Microsoft finally deprecated for good old versions of windows and also allowed Edge to be installed alongside IE11 with a lot of compat integrations which IT could leverage.

So where are we today?
10/14

We are seeing a moderate but steady decline in IE usage in the last couple of years. 1/2 of customers are using the opportunity to upgrade as they switch to the new UI (3 years later than we expected). However the amount of customers using IE11 is still non-negligible: 500k
11/14

If the 500k were distributed and spread we will be ok, but as you can see on the graph below (updated last week), we still have big customers where they rely solely on IE11, which is very concerning, since killing IE11 support can fundamentally disrupt their businesses. 12/14

We are officially dropping support for IE11 at the end of 2020, but would we really be able to do it this time?

The business of our customers depend on us, so dropping IE11 means a fundamental disruption. It's a very hard call for us, certainly a costly one for everyone. 13/14

Next release we will be landing the first feature that will not have a functional equivalent in IE11 (graceful degradation though), so hopefully it will be taken as another carrot to move. Wish as luck, maybe only 183 days left! :)

#enterpriselifeishard
#platform
#end

14/14