[a_humean]

You are right, but critically it isn't supported by IE 11 which is probably what the author cares about. There is probably a majority of projects, including mine, that will have to wait for IE11 usage, especially in the corporate/enterprise sector, to sharply decline before using grid.

Microsoft intends to support IE11 until 2025.

[TomK32]

https://caniuse.com/#search=grid If you look at the relative usage, IE11 with its 2.64% is closely followed by Opera Mini with 2.29%

[dspillett]

That is overall audience though, for more specific sets of people the IE11 proportion is much higher.

For a game, a technical development site, a home improvement tutorial site, a blog about My Little Pony, other things that are targeting only (or at least primarily) home and/or technical users you are probably able to completely ignore IE11, but if your project cares to be used in certain commercial or government/public sectors (investment banking in my case, health care and education too I'm told, ...) IE11 support is unfortunately still absolutely essential.

[zaarn]

Don't underestimate the power of business customers using outdated software. (I have to support IE10 everytime and IE9 if possible)

[kaushalmodi]

> You are right, but critically it isn't supported by IE 11

This has always bugged me. Why does IE always lag behind in such CSS features? What kind of politics is this? Or is it that Microsoft does not have a big or smart enough browser team that can bring the IE/Edge features at par with Firefox/Chrome?

I've been so pissed off by this that I've started a micro-revolution by not caring if my blog renders well on IE/Edge. IE is pain in meeting compatibility with the CSP headers too. Hopefully more people start doing this so that people are forced to move to a better browser than IE.

[koboll]

IE11 does not autoupdate.

Thus it is stuck, frozen in time, a deadweight clinging onto front-end web development.

[guhidalg]

Or, viewed another way, IE developers have a stable API surface to work on that isn't a moving target every hour.

[dak1]

Evergreen browsers provide a stable API surface as well, because the APIs are backwards compatible. Adding support for CSS Grid does not break Flexbox or anything else I was already using. It simply gives me another tool.

[ahoy]

There's no moving target. You can write your layout with tables like it's 2005 and it'll render just fine in the latest version of firefox/chrome/safari/edge.

[talmand]

What are IE developers?

[a_humean]

Web Developers that do enterprise software.

[andrei_says_]

People who work in financial/healthcare/government institutions have locked workstations and cannot install anything so they cannot move to another OS or browser until the org decides to do so, which is a complex, expensive and maybe even impossible endeavor.

For a blog this wouldn’t be a big issue but if it’s a company website and your biggest clients see a broken layout, it’s a problem.

[kumarharsh]

Edge supports all CSS Grid properties.

[sbegaudeau]

On one of our project, we are using CSS Grid but for a part of our application we need to support IE11. For this use case, we have decided to use the Grid implementation of IE11 and while different on some points, it is still close enough to be maintainable next to some CSS Grid if you don't use some advanced concepts.

[pjmlp]

Recently I just heard of a company that finally, in 2018, upgraded their IE requirements to IE 11.

On the other hand, given that CSS grids were proposed by the XAML team, IE 11 does support the initial version of them, which is already better than not having them at all.

[dspillett]

> Recently I just heard of a company that finally, in 2018, upgraded their IE requirements to IE 11.

One of our clients is one of the largest investment/savings banks in the UK. For services for their back-office and branch users they have only just dropped IE8 support as a requirement.

Logs I have access to show a fair number of users still have IE8 and are using it to access our legacy products, though we are assured that everyone either has IE11 or Chrome or both so for the newer services releasing to them RealSoonNow(tm) our insistence on dropping support for IE prior to 11 is not going to be a problem (though we have heard that before, so I on this matter I await the post rollout feedback with a mix of hope and trepidation!).

[talmand]

Personally I find the idea of a bank supporting such an outdated browser disturbing on a security level.

[itsmendy]

Why?

[dspillett]

The feeling is often that using such old software implies being "backwards" so possible vulnerable to exploits in the older code. Of course while the browser is still officially supported (as IE11 is due to be for some time) security releases are still being made so it should in theory be as safe as a current browser.

BUT:

1. Still using IE8 is absolutely a red flag, that stopped being supported in 2016.

2. Being so far behind with browsers may imply being behind generally, and while IE11 is still security patched maybe the organisation runs other old software that isn't (news flash: I can report that at least two organisations I know of routinely run software in their back-office environments that is not longer supported at all because the vendor closed, the product was never passed on to other maintainers or opened, and projects to replace the affected software are massively behind schedule - for obvious reasons I won't state who those organisations are and what the software is).