Hi,
To fix several issues in FlowRouter, I had to remove page.js dependency and let FlowRouter do the all the routing stuff.
At it makes things simple and fix a lot of bugs: https://github.com/kadirahq/flow-router/tree/no-pagejs
So, the now question is whether we are going to support IE8/9 with FlowRouter 4.0.
My idea is to remove that since Mircosoft is also no longer maintaining those browsers.
What do you guys think?
0 voters
Is it possible to keep IE9 but get rid of IE8 and still benefit from some easier development workflows? I believe IE9 is barely needed for most people but I would probably still keep support for about one more year.
The startup I work for and my own startup both barely have any IE visitors, less than 5% but it still happens of course. IE penetration at least in the Philippines is incredibly low vs. Chrome. I would wait until next year when nearly everyone is on Edge (except for corporations that can’t upgrade for certain reasons)
5% sounds low but 5% can mean thousands of dollar less in revenue when not supporting those visitors.
Speaking for myself as a startup wannabe guy, I couldn’t care less if my applications provide support for IE 8/9. With flexbox grid, they won’t anyways and I don’t want to be stuck using solutions that support older browsers. I’ve had my share of browser compability hacking in the past, not anymore.
Most of users of IE in my country - old people, office workers, children at school, are not in my target group - they become my target group when they come back home and there, most of them have a decent browser.
The poll plugin behaves very weird, even after refreshing. When there’s a new vote, the bar and percentages jump from one option to another - so 1 vote changes from 90% for Remove to 90% for Keep and then another vote from 90% Keep to 90% Remove.
In fact would it be possible to keep a kind of plugin for IE9 ? is there so many code for this browser ?
So, most of the votes are for keeping the support.
But, Microsoft is no longer give support for those browsers and they’ve clear paths for upgrade.
See: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/End-of-IE-support
Then for me, there is no reason for us to work on this.
To me, every line of code is a liability, special IE8/9 specific stuff, which are very hard to test.
Presumably if you need the IE8/9 support, you can just use an older version of FlowRouter. The kind of organisations that are stuck with old IE versions are the kind that also do weird stuff like blocking websockets, doing SSL MITM and generally having broken proxy setups - which often breaks Meteor sites anyway. Screw 'em ha.
IE8 and IE9 are undeniably a real pain to support.
That said, that article is a little misleading as I believe Microsoft are still supporting IE8 and IE9 on operating systems that can’t upgrade to a newer version of IE.
In the case of IE8, it’s pretty insignificant but for IE9 it means all users still on Windows Vista - which is sadly a fair chunk of people.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-Internet-Explorer
Since, afaik, IE8 doesn’t work with Meteor and React at the moment anyway I’d vote for IE9 and up support if it doesn’t cause too much pain.
Do not forget to create default hook for unsupported browsers, so we may handle it, for example to output info for user with recommendations to update browser.
I’m quite surprised that so many people vote for keeping IE8/9. I would prefer a stable FlowRouter release, and I know how hard it is to support these old browsers. Microsoft has deprecated them for quite a while and are themselves propagating the use of modern browsers. If I would really need IE8/9 support in my app, I’d just use an older version of FlowRouter.
I would say deprecating IE8/9 is fine but then imo FlowRouter 3.x should at least be updated for another year or so to still work if something in meteor breaks it.
Personally, I can’t imagine how people write Meteor apps for IE8 
respect! 
I see no logical reason to support IE8, IE9 or even 10 now Microsoft has dropped support for them.
I’d rather @arunoda made the package better / leaner by only supporting modern browsers. I work at a University which is archaic when it comes to technology and even they’ve upgraded to IE11 after the Microsoft announcement.
+1 for removal.
Maintain FR3 with bug support and FR4 have the improvements.
Something like jQuery 1 and 2.
I recommend not dropping IE8. In developing countries (like mine) this is still a reality, since it comes installed with Win7 and it is widely “pirated”.
Like I said, this poll plugin is not a very reliable one:
I don’t think its a good idea to take an entire wide country like ours as base for support on a project. IMHO you should really be focusing on your project’s target, maybe your G. Analytics displays something different.
Anyway, IE is 6% of our market share, and its all of the IEs, inside this 6% you should exclude people with IE10+.
As @brajt mentioned, I’m not sure the poll is working correctly? When I first voted it was 10 for NO support, 1 for support. Now that distribution has completely switched, which is odd.
In addition, try switching your vote. If I switch my vote from remove to keep, the keep percentage goes down, and the remove percentage goes up… it makes no sense.
Agreed… no need to hang on to the past and cripple the future.
I’m happy not to support anything that isn’t an autoupdating browser 