Feedback for ending support for Internet Explorer 11
We are considering ending official support for Internet Explorer 11. Its usage on GitLab.com has been declining for quite some time and continuing to support IE pulls resources off of new feature development, impacting velocity of new value to our customers. Please have a look at the proposed timeline and detailed reasoning below. Note that this decision is not finalized yet.
We invite you to provide feedback in this issue. You can find our preliminary internal discussions over here: #55313 (closed)
Proposed timeline
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GitLab 12.9 (March 2020) add a warning message to GitLab for all users of IE11
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GitLab 12.10 (April 2020) will be the last release to officially support IE11
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GitLab 13.0 (May 2020) officially deprecates support for IE11
- No new code/features will be written that support IE11 from May 2020. This is the date from which we no longer claim to support IE11.
- Documentation will be updated to reflect that we are not actively supporting Internet Explorer 11 anymore
- Engineers will stop testing for Internet Explorer 11
- Bug reports for Internet Explorer 11 will be closed as "won't fix"
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GitLab 13.4 (September 2020) will remove code that was just needed for Internet Explorer 11 support and is not needed in more modern browsers:
Pre-existing code written to support IE11 will be removed in September 2020. This means that some features which used to work in IE11 will no longer work from this date.
This means that on gitlab.com IE11 will be usable until 2020-08-18 (Monday before 2020-08-22). There might be some browser specific bugs though.
Reasons for ending support
There are multiple reasons for ending Internet Explorer 11 support. Some of them are related to the lifecycle of Windows, others are related to our values, performance and developer happiness.
Internet Explorer 11 was initially released in 2013 for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. While it had originally been shipped with Windows 10 in 2015, the default browser of that operating system is now Microsoft Edge. Extended Support for Windows 7 has ended at the beginning of this year. Currently there is no supported operating system out there for which Internet Explorer 11 is the default browser. We know that there is an extended Security Updates support for Windows 7, but there are also other browsers like Chrome or Firefox available for these systems.
Web standards are changing constantly, especially since IE11 was initially released, and newer features of the web platform are not supported by it. This forces us to build GitLab with older technologies. Sometimes it is possible to transpile our source code which uses newer technologies into source code which uses older technologies. Sometimes it is not possible to use newer technologies at all. The usage of newer web platform technologies allows us to create a more maintainable application. Developers can write code more efficiently, spend time writing features and improving existing ones rather than fixing bugs for an outdated browser.
The aforementioned transpiling process also leads to bloated JavaScript files which we currently send down to every browser. So supporting Internet Explorer actually hurts every GitLab user. While there have been considerations of supporting browser specific builds, this means that we would still need to package and serve our Frontend code twice which will move the problem from the user to the administrators of GitLab instances.
Links to our plans and other information
- Early discussion issue on ending IE11 support: #55313 (closed)
- Documentation on GitLab browser support
- Microsoft Windows 7 End Of Life announcement
How can you help?
We want to hear from you, especially administrators of self-hosted instances. Let us know if having GitLab function properly on Internet Explorer 11 is key to your business.