I have been wanting to get some practical experience with CSS Grid for some time, and therefore decided to use it for my blog layout.
After going through the videos by Wes Bos at cssgrid.io, I felt ready and spent a days time setting up the layout for my blog – completely ignoring any tests in Internet Explorer (stupid, I know, but sometimes that’s how thing goes). Afterwards I found out that Internet Explorer 11 only supports an old specification for CSS Grid, which caused my design to completely fail.
To support, or not
Before redoing the whole thing using flex, floats, and what have you, I spent some time contemplating whether or not I really needed to support Internet Explorer and came up with the following.
Reasons to support Internet Explorer
- When only accounting for Desktop Browsers, IE 11 still has around 6% market share world wide
- I would like as many as possible to have access to my content
- It feels like the right thing to do
Reasons to not support Internet Explorer
- When only accounting for Desktop Browsers, IE 11 only has around 6% market share world wide
- When accounting for Mobile and Tablets as well, IE 11 market share world wide drops to around 3.5%
- I will mainly be publishing content on web development, and I suspect that most readers of this content type does not use IE
- Microsoft has ended support for IE versions below 11
- Edge, the replacement for IE, is available now
- We should drive the web forward, which is not done by supporting aging browsers
Conclusion
As you might have guessed, I ended up choosing not to support IE 11 – mainly due to my estimation that the segment reading my content, does no longer use IE 11. So, I set myself free of this burden!
Before you decide whether or not to support IE 11 you should give it some thought – Do not just follow some advise you find online. Think of who the target group for you content is. For example: users in conservative businesses tends to have a higher use rate of IE, than the market share indicates.
Let me know if you have thoughts on this (or more reasons to keep supporting IE), thanks. 🙂
Note: I have not been able to locate the creator of the browser war image used in this post. If you know who it is, please let me know.