Redmine

I've assigned this to 5.0.0 for feedback.

I think it is too early to end support for Internet Explorer 11 because not a few people are accessing Redmine with IE11.

I just grep'd our company's Redmine hosting access log and found that 15% of the accesses last week were using Internet Explorer. I don't think 15% is a small percentage.

I am not against ending support for IE11, but I think we should continue to support it at least until August. If Redmine 5.0.0 will be released by August, then the target version of this issue should not be 5.0.0.

Most of the well know platforms already ended support for IE (Github, Gitlab, Jira, Gmail, etc) and the fact that Microsoft ends the support this summer it should be a good reason to encourage those 15% users that it's time to upgrade their browser. Also, running such a old browser could be a security issue in the coming months.

Also, I don't think that Redmine 5.0.0 will be released sooner than this autumn (6 months from 4.2.0) so maybe it's better to drop the old code now when we already do a lot of updates for Rails 6.1 and Ruby 3.0.

Please reconsider this.

Marius BALTEANU wrote:

Also, I don't think that Redmine 5.0.0 will be released sooner than this autumn (6 months from 4.2.0) so maybe it's better to drop the old code now when we already do a lot of updates for Rails 6.1 and Ruby 3.0.

I am in favor of dropping support for Internet Explorer 11 in Redmine 5.0.0 and start removing code for IE11 now, if Redmine 5.0.0 will not be released before August.

for those who still rely on Internet Explorer 11 (even if I don't understand why), they should stay on Redmine 4.x or use a modern browser, even the legacy version of Edge (released 6 years ago) is much better.
I think a major version of Redmine is a good time to drop support of IE11 and a month or two of remaining official maintenance/security support by Microsoft shouldn't be a reason to wait.

15% seems to be a lot are you sure you don't count Edge users? It's ~2% on https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide and still dropping.

Pavel Rosický wrote:

15% seems to be a lot are you sure you don't count Edge users? It's ~2% on https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide and still dropping.

I counted user agents that contain "Trident", so accesses from Edge browsers are excluded. I don't think 15% is a strange number. This is because Internet Explorer has a higher share in Japan and many of them are enterprise users. Therefore, Internet Explorer tends to have a higher percentage of access in services for businesses.

In Japan, Internet Explorer has 7% of the desktop browser market share (surprisingly, higher than Firefox!). Some companies do not allow their employees to use browsers other than IE for compatibility with their existing information systems.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/japan

Ending support for Internet Explorer right now will cause a backlash from such users. However, it will be much easier to persuade them if Redmine 5.0 is released after Microsoft ends support for Internet Explorer in its own services.

So, I am in favor of dropping support for Internet Explorer 11 in Redmine 5.0.0 and start removing code for IE11 right now, if Redmine 5.0.0 will not be released before August.

I see, thanks for the explanation.

Microsoft is going to end Internet Explorer after 5 months. I think we can drop the support for Internet Explorer in the trunk right now.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/05/19/the-future-of-internet-explorer-on-windows-10-is-in-microsoft-edge/

the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15, 2022, for certain versions of Windows 10.