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by mleland 2270 days ago
I feel like the projects that rely on bootstrap are ones that have a larger IE audience.

I hate supporting IE, but that has always been the appeal of bootstrap for me.

1 comments

You can remain using older versions then.

But they can't really stay relevant and keep supporting IE.

Why? Their plan for bootstrap v5 at the moment is just some cleanup to fix mistakes they made and remove the jquery dependency. I dont see the reason for these goals to not support ie11.

As much as i hate ie11 we have to still support it as its used in many businesses using our softwares

I think it makes sense to formally drop the IE dependency in versions sooner than when you’re making changes that actually break IE.

Besides, replacing jquery May indeed be why they chose to drop IE right now. One of the biggest selling points of jquery, and one of the biggest contributors to its heaviness, is cross browser support including IE.

As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach.

> As one of the comments in the linked issue points out, dropping IE11 means they can also start using basic JS constructs, like Array.prototype.forEach.

Array.prototype.forEach is supported from IE9.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

EDIT: It is the nodelist api that isn't supported in IE. Not Array.prototype.forEach.

Quite a lot of these basic JS constructs even if they are missing (most aren't in IE11) are very easily polyfilled.

Personally I think it is fine that they drop support if they don't feel the need to support it. Bootstrap 4 isn't going to vanish.

And if you can polyfill, that is good way to drop support for ie11. Personally instead of support ie11 out of the box, have have create custom build or expect them to do polyfilling themselves. This way they can optimize for the remaining browsers.
Knowingly being locked into an older version of a technology is bad omen, e.g., security. Granted, it is bootstrap, and we're talking about IE 11. But some XSS issue might pop up that doesn't get patched in pre-Bootstrap v5.

And with time, your product that's built on Bootstrap v4 (or earlier) is only going to continue decaying.