Proposal: IE 11 Support

[amirrustam]

Current Status - last updated February 11, 2020

✅ Under Consideration ❌ Not Prioritized ❌ Not Under Active Development ℹ️ Cypress currently supports Firefox and Chrome-family browsers (including Edge and Electron).

Objective

Add support for running Cypress tests within the IE 11 web browser.

IE 11 End of Life According to Microsoft, development of new features for Internet Explorer has ceased. However, it will continue to be maintained as part of the support policy for the versions of Windows with which it is included. _Source: Wikipedia_

This is a placeholder proposal issue. Necessary details will be added once this feature is prioritized.

[kwiersma]

As someone who works on an application for the healthcare sector where IE 11 will be around a long time I would love to see support implemented. Kudos for considering this rather then just dropping plans because MS declared IE 11 EOL. :)

[jpike88]

There is still a massive amount of computers on IE 11 and while IT departments exist this will probably remain the case, so this would be very good to have.

[levenleven]

Hope Safari will get higher priority as it definitely not going to disappear and actually is new IE 😁

[jpike88]

@levenleven thats weird cause I never have Safari behaviour deviate from Chrome. shouldn’t IE11 be more important because of the much higher risk of deviation (such as use of polyfills)?

[levenleven]

@jpike88 jokes aside, both are important. I'm just hoping MS will try to kill IE faster because Edge should have compatability mode. Also more and more non enterprise projects just drop IE support

[Mouvedia]

There's already an issue for this: #1564 It has—as of today—96 👍 and a 15$ bounty; #6423 should be closed as a dupe of #1564. Also remember to update the closing comment on #310.

[vladnauto]

We actually been using Cypress for more than a year and waiting for IE11 support, because we have a lot of customers in Japan, who are using IE11. Those clients are very important to us. So if Cypress doesn't plan to support IE11, we will have to switch to some other framework.

[tomkel]

@vladnauto Feel free to donate engineers or money to the effort

[juergba]

I'm a maintainer of Mocha, and sometimes I'm dreaming of a life without IE11. If Mocha dropped/freezed IE11 support, what implications would it have for Cypress?

[lakshmanp21]

this is a must have IE11 support, as most of financial domains still have IE11 as primary browser

[morficus]

@juergba I don't think it's realistic for a project as large as Mocha to drop support for IE11 in the near term. Microsoft's official statement on IE11 is that it will continue to receive updates as long as the OS it is installed on is also still supported. That means that as long as Windows 10 is still around then they will continue to support IE11.

It also goes with out saying that major corporations around the world have a heavy dependency on IE11. Edge failed to gain traction and "new Edge" is still extremely new. Mocha dropping support for IE11 in the near term would seriously hinder a lot of developers and projects.

[jpike88]

IE11 isn't going away for a long, long long time.

[jennifer-shehane]

Hey everyone, please try to keep the discussion focused on your personal or company needs for Cypress supporting IE11. We don't need a debate in general about IE11. We'd like to hear directly from people who use Cypress and want testing for the IE11 browser so that we can better evaluate our roadmap.

@juergba Thanks for sharing. Evaluating our dependencies support for IE11 will definitely factor into our decision.

[nicooprat]

Hi, we work for big clients, mainly in french finance & insurance companies. Mixpanel stats show ~40% of IE 11 as of today, which is steady for the last few years. I suppose their IT stick on this browser as long as possible, and we will certainly see a big change when they change all their software at once ; but for now, it's the single most used browser by our customers. Second comes Chrome, but with a lot of different version, sometimes pretty outdated.

So, thanks for thinking about non-tech companies :) Looking forward to using Cypress with IE 11.

[estefafdez]

+1 to this idea, some of us are still supporting IE11 as browser and we need to test againt it, thanks!

[jtaylordigital]

We also support a lot of corporate clients that are still using IE11. The majority of our traffic comes from IE11, so Cypress adding support for it would be a big help.

[hukka]

In case it's easier than actual IE11 support, having Chromium Edge in the IE11 mode would already help.

[RicardoVaranda]

Hi @jennifer-shehane ,

Thanks for the clarification.

In our organisation (50k+ users) IE11 is still the default browser. Many legacy applications do not support Chrome yet. I have been trying to adopt within the organisation and everyone can clearly see the benefits of using it over other frameworks but at the end of the day if it's not browser agnostic it makes the conversation very difficult. On that note great work on supporting Firefox and the new Chromium based Edge. I really hope you reconsider this and support IE11 in the near future or sadly we will have to look for an alternative solution.

[mali313]

My customer is using IE11 and their organization it is still heavily used

[admah]

Like others have said, as someone in the healthcare space, IE11 support is a must-have. We're working in large networks of hospitals that all require our application work in IE11.

[vidup]

Hi. Here at Skillup we work in the french training space. We provide a SaaS to companies that help them involve their employees in their training process, as well as automate a lot of work for HR and managers. We have different browser requirements depending on our users' scope: there are only a few HR users per company, so we officially support the recent versions of Chrome and Mozilla for their application, since we can tell them to install these browsers face to face. In this part we've started experimenting with Cypress and it's honestly been a great experience, so we will switch from Selenium soon. Congratulations on your work on Mozilla & Chromium Edge support, by the way !

On the other side, our clients' employees and managers often cannot chose their browser which is installed by default by their IT service. This year, around 28% of our users are on IE11, and 27% for Edge (we hope most of them will update to the chromium based version sooner or later). It's been pretty stable for 3 years. Since they number between a few hundreds and a few thousands per company, we can't really do anything about it, and we're not big enough to reject potential clients because of their browser, so honestly even if it was 5% it would still be a prerequisite. This is what is preventing us from going full Cypress instead of our current Selenium E2E solution.

To be honest, I believe a lot of small to medium B2B software companies have the same constraint.

Thanks again for your work. Cypress is a great product.

[lakshmanp21]

+1 Legacy systems as most of banking domains are still on IE11

[evillemez]

We're In exactly the same boat as @admah and others:

Like others have said, as someone in the healthcare space, IE11 support is a must-have. We're working in large networks of hospitals that all require our application work in IE11.

Healthcare in particular is an issue and not going to change any time soon because we're dealing with large organizations and inflexible policies.

[anastasiaZen]

We're In exactly the same boat as @admah and others:

Like others have said, as someone in the healthcare space, IE11 support is a must-have. We're working in large networks of hospitals that all require our application work in IE11.

Healthcare in particular is an issue and not going to change any time soon because we're dealing with large organizations and inflexible policies.

The same thing in my company. We are really willing to keep using Cypress but there are concerns about IE11. It would be great if you make the decision to support it.

[mastacheata]

Has anyone actually ever tried what happens if you run Cypress in IE or EdgeHTML? There's a bunch of comments in the driver referring to IE11, so it looks like some developers were preparing for this to happen in the future.

If there was a list of things broken/needed for IE11 and EdgeHTML it would at least be a start for developing that functionality. Definitely willing to give some dev hours to this cause here.

[jennifer-shehane]

There was some initial proof of concept work started in this PR, which may give an idea to the extent of work required: https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/pull/5224

[colinscz]

Most corporate clients I interacted with are using IE11 and the old Edge, unfortunately they will not be forced to replace these before Microsoft cuts off the support. Since the IT departments are usually enforcing IE11 and old Edge as the only browsers the user also has no other choice. So at least to have one of those two supported would be a great benefit and another reason to choose Cypress over another e2e test-framework.

From personal experience in the old Edge we faced almost never an issue with javascript-based applications, it is most of the time IE11 which could have an issue. (f.e.: CSS, use of certain JS methods or attributes) So if we have to make the case for using an e2e test framework clients will always want one which covers also the browsers they use, as for Cypress this is then not the case and they would vote for another option.

To summarise my statement, I would vote to go with IE11 since the old Edge in my opinion is much more stable and cross-browser testing is in my opinion for that one not crucial.

[tbredin]

+1 its the main browser we have that would benefit from test coverage.

One of our biggest clients is still using a lot of filing cabinets and fax machines, so getting off IE 11 ... let's just say its gonna be a huge difficulty for us for another decade at least ... its not going to happen, sadly

And I say this as someone who has worked in teams who have successfully argued for notoriously slow-moving government departments in my country to move off of IE

[arjunamrith]

Hey I really like cypress and would like to use it as our primary tool for e2e testing. We are currently on selenium and are evaluating cypress on the staging environments We now use cypress for chrome and firefox testing but 60% of our client base still uses IE11 hence we cannot fully commit to cypress. And I think this will be the case for the next 3-4 years at least hence we would greatly benefit from IE11 support. Keep up the good work, awesome job on this project so far 👏

[Vandivier]

Capital One CreditWise dev here.

Our current browser support policy indicates IE11 is officially supported as a Tier 2 app. My team specifically, and the other client-facing web projects I'm aware of, plan to support IE11 at a minimum through end of year.

[mattjanssen]

We develop a SaaS for enterprise companies and must support IE11 for the foreseeable future. We would love to use the paid Cypress solution if it supported IE11.

[poplevente]

We also would like to see IE11 support, as a lot of corporate clients are still using IE11 and probably will for quite some time

[mastacheata]

I guess everyone knows that IE11 is still in use at large corporate clients. That's the only kind of business where IE was widely used ever since IE6.

If IE11 support is wanted and you already work around the various IE problems, shave off an hour or two of your usual work and spend it on helping with the PR mentioned a couple of weeks ago by Jennifer Shehane.

IE is not everyones favorite browser, so if it's not one of us that needs IE support for business purposes, I sincerely doubt anyone else will jump on board and work on IE problems when there's still other stuff to do.

I'll probably have time to look into that on Thursday and will at least try to get some of the conflicts of that PR solved. Not sure how far I can get with my limited Open source budget (we get one day every month to work on stuff not directly related to our projects that might or might not benefit the company, including open source stuff that is not part of the actual project budget)

[AlexJeffcott]

We (AMBOSS gmbh which is a medical knowledge and learning platform) are switching to Cypress.

However, hospitals and physicians (especially in Germany) use ie11 heavily so this is a very serious drawback for us and our users.

[dveldhoen]

+1 for this. It's the only thing Cypress is missing to be perfect.

[mwickett]

Although overall IE usage is relatively low as a percentage of traffic, at HashiCorp we generate more than enough leads from users on IE11 to justify supporting the experience, and therefore need to be able to test against it. We are a B2B company with many large enterprise clients, so not really a surprise there.

Completely understand that it's a massive effort to support it, but adding my +1 to it.

Cypress is our only e2e test tool at the moment, and (sadly), we're going to have to spin Selenium to get some minimal test coverage for IE11. As many have pointed out, it's extremely brittle and we've been burned by IE being busted one too many times.

[TroyAlford]

I will +1 that my company produces software for the financial industry, and our experience is that 40+% of our site's clients are forced to use IE11 due to internal company policies. As a result, we have to support IE11.

[jpike88]

https://www.americaninno.com/atlanta/fundings/how-a-san-fran-vc-firm-grew-atls-cypress-io-to-help-developers-at-netflix-slack/

Cypress.io, an Atlanta-based startup that offers automated testing for applications in web browsers, has completed a $9 million Series A round, led by previous investor Bessemer Venture Partners.

lol

[MichaelWMerritt]

It may seem redundant based on the other feedback here, but I want to +1 as this is huge blocker for most, if not all, companies that create web-based applications for the insurance and financial industries in the US, and worldwide. At last check, IE11 is the predominant browser of those institutions. Having IE11 support would definitely increase adoption of Cypress!

[poplevente]

we basically had to give up on cypress because of the missing IE support :(

[Mouvedia]

As of today this issue has 154 👍 (tallying #1564). It's the 7th issue with the most +1, just behind support for Safari.

Since it's in the top 10, it should obviously be "prioritized".

[darrendahl]

We use cypress for our full end to end tests but we have selenium just for a cross browser sanity test. Definitely would be nice to move completely to cypress and deprecate our selenium tests.

[crazyjaco]

We are a large regional news and media publisher. A large portion of our audience skews older using older windows machines that use IE or mobile traffic on Safari.

We do not currently use Cypress, but would like to. The IE limitation is the main thing holding us back.

[presian]

I work on enormously big health care software that runs only on IE. We are struggling to make our Selenium tests stable enough to actually trust them. IE won't be removed as the main browser for our clients so we have to run our test against it. If cypress could run IE will make my life easier.

+1 for the proposal

[mastacheata]

Can someone from cypress please lock this issue?

There's about one new message every week that notifies everyone in this thread where new people declare their support for this issue, but that's not helpful at all to anyone either interested in working on the problem or waiting for it to be solved.

What's needed is someone who splits the IE issue into small chunks that can actually be worked on. Or at least someone who can list the problems that IE11 poses for running cypress on it.

[jennifer-shehane]

@mastacheata We want to hear people's feedback on their needs for IE 11 support, so we don't intend to lock the issue as long as the discussion is within that regard.

You can unsubscribe from notifications directly from issue if you would like to no longer receive notifications for the thread.

[paulyoung5]

+1 - similar to other comments, our company provides software for other businesses across a variety of sectors, where there's constraints on browser usage etc. We've been road-testing Cypress for a handful of greenfield projects, it works really great! IE11 (and Safari) support would really help with advocating its use internally

I can imagine it's probably a huge task to support IE11, I don't know if it's got a DevTools API or anything. @jennifer-shehane is there a list of tasks for IE11 support anywhere, that people could look at + make contributions to help with the burden?

[chrisphillers]

Working in the healthcare system ie11 is very important to our product - and I cant see that ending anytime soon.

[vrodnyanskiy]

We would appreciate support for IE11 as it is a gap in our automation test coverage.

[Natesh11]

so, will there be a support for IE browsers in future? where do we stand on this as of today ? the answer to this is going to potentially decide our strategies and no doubt we all love cypress.