egardner added a comment.
I understand this is a decision for WMDE, but I'd like to offer a little perspective from the WMF side of things. **I'd argue that we are reaching a point where the cost of retaining IE11 support is becoming costly enough to outweigh the benefits**. @wiese is right that our lack of a front-end build tool makes things more difficult than they need to be (something I hope we can remedy soon). However, as the wider front-end ecosystem moves on, we will increasingly see places where the "compatibility gap" is so wide that even tools like Babel can't bridge it. Supporting IE11 will block (or at least complicate) our adoption of certain software. One example is Vue 3. Vue's new reactivity features rely on Proxy objects, which just don't exist in ES5. Supporting IE will block us from upgrading to the latest version of Vue regardless of whether a build tool is used or not. Dropping IE11 support may also allow us to run a lighter-weight toolchain, even if we do end up adopting some build tools. Vite is a modern build tool that seems to have a lot of potential – additional plugins are required to support Vue 2 and to enable generation of ES5-compatible bundles. I'm hopeful that we'll soon reach a point where WMF and WMDE can combine our efforts into a single component library (see T286946 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T286946> and the upcoming developer summit). If we create a shared library and migrate our projects to that library, but remain on Vue 2, we will at some point have to go back and re-migrate things to Vue 3. Dropping IE support and moving to Vue 3 sooner than later may save us all a non-trivial amount of work in the future. As of July 2021, IE traffic across all sites <https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-browser/browser-family-timeseries> is down to 0.6%. Can we provide these users with an adequate no-JS experience to benefit the vast majority who don't use a legacy browser? TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T285045 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: egardner Cc: Lydia_Pintscher, karapayneWMDE, Lucas_Werkmeister_WMDE, wiese, Tonina_Zhelyazkova_WMDE, Ladsgroup, Michael, egardner, AnneT, Jakob_WMDE, Sarai-WMDE, Addshore, Aklapper, Invadibot, maantietaja, Akuckartz, Nandana, Lahi, Gq86, GoranSMilovanovic, QZanden, LawExplorer, _jensen, rosalieper, Scott_WUaS, Volker_E, Wikidata-bugs, aude, Mbch331
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