I applaud Microsoft on their decision to make an up-to-date browser like Edge. But the conditions in which this transition is made makes me fear that IE 11 may become the new IE8 for web developers.
These are the reasons to fear:
- Lets be realistic: from its release IE11 lacked support for many features and tended to have much more errors than their competitors (Chrome, Firefox, Opera...)
- You can't (or at least Microsoft isn't encouraging it) have Edge on Windows 7 and 8. This means that quite a few IE users will remain using IE11 for a long time, as happened with IE8.
- IE11 has a significant share (around 5-6% ww) and in contrast with browsers like chrome, its changing ration is low (I mean it increases and diminishes slowly).
Acting as a future teller it looks like IE11 may be a sort of end-point similar to what happened/happens with IE8. I guess we will be falling back and checking for support of some features for a very very long time. For example, ES6 support is beginning to increase quickly among modern browsers, but I can see a future 1-2 years from now when all major browsers support it but there is still a 3-4% of IE11 users that force you to use a ES6 to ES5 decoder...
This is my thought but I have no idea on how to face this situation. What could we expect? What can we do about it?
