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.

[raj-balaebail]

Adding to the chorus, working in FinTech, a lot of our clients still use IE. We are moving away from Selenium and evaluating Cypress or TestCafe for our needs. Cypress wins in almost every respect, but lack of IE support can be a potential deal breaker !!

[alexisgahon]

Working for an insurtech and our client and our support definitely need IE11 ... Cypress is by far the best tool for e2e testing ! But we have to use another one to test IE11

[patcon]

I contribute to pol.is, a platform that uses statistics and machine learning to run large scale consensus-building exercises. This system is part of the core of vTaiwan, a process by which Taiwan runs public consultations and crowdsources legislation.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simple-but-ingenious-system-taiwan-uses-to-crowdsource-its-laws/

https://github.com/pol-is/polis

Polis has adopted cypress as an e2e testing tool (yay for running tests on GitHub Actions!) But we've committed to supporting back to IE8 for the most widely-accessed "participation interface", so as not to disenfranchise citizens who must be able to contribute to public consultations. Would be rad if we could use cypress to get this assurance of support.

[patcon]

Also, might we be able to split this issue into two: "request for comment" and "implemention"?

I really feel for your encouragement of on-the-ground customer feedback, but can also see why many people would subscribe to this for quite different motives... Both are understandable ❤️

[gtrufitt]

At The Guardian we still support IE11 as a gracefully degraded browser which require JS to run as expected, so this would be good. We also believe that supporting IE11 is important as 11% of screen reader users still rely on it so our browser support numbers are not the the whole picture https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#browsercombos

[Mouvedia]

5224 needs to be reopened

[luciusyeah]

I agree with comments above: Support for IE 11 would very much be appreciated. Especially since browserstack costs a small fortune.

[mjaeggi]

I think this should be considered before supporting IE11

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/17/21372487/microsoft-internet-explorer-11-support-end-365-legacy-edge

[raminder]

I agree, there should be support of IE11 browser.I am working on creating new framework, we are choosing testcafe over cypress only because of IE11 support.

[IanVS]

@mjaeggi That article is a little confusing, but the key words are "across its Microsoft 365 apps and services next year." Microsoft is not ending support for IE11 globally, and many people will continue to use it (sometimes through no choice of their own).

[sscotth]

Mainstream support was recently EXTENDED for another year. The article specifically refers to the Office 365 webapp, not IE itself.

Extended support is currently scheduled to end October 14, 2025 or for the life of Windows 10.

Internet Explorer is a component of the Windows operating system and the most current version will continue to follow the specific support lifecycle policy for the operating system on which it is installed. Internet Explorer 11 will be supported for the life of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10.

Countdown: https://death-to-ie11.com/

[begli80]

IE support is a must. In our company we decided to go with nightwatch because cypress doesn't support IE and Safari

[semics-tech]

Not sure how feasible this would be, but Microsoft Edge has an IE mode. Does anyone have an idea of the effort required for cypress to enable this before a test?

[kostia7alania]

+1000500 Legacy systems as most of banking domains are still on IE11

[greghqa]

Over a third of our customer base is on IE11, so we're having to consider Protractor or something else though we really like Cypress :(

[fearhq]

IE11 is still used by a large swath of tech-illiterate end-users that sort of just have it installed, and don't know any better. Unfortunately, we sometimes break IE11 functionnality, and require either labour-costly exploratory tests, or a second set of selenium based tests

[Tjerk-Haaye-Henricus]

IE11 Support would be awesome :)

[AlanKrygowski]

IE support would truly be awesome!

[kkoo95]

Running unit tests with Jest is (way) more featureful than using Karma/Jasmine, but its lack of great cross-browser support compared to Karma have always slowed me down switching to it. I think having Cypress supporting IE and Safari would definitely be a game changer, because i could peacefully let Karma go 💔 and thoughtfuly rely on E2E testing to check exotic JS API and real DOM rendering. As for my preference over which browser first: IE first. Because we usually see it more often used in companies, and because it's so different than everybody else, it needs more attention 👶

[efreethy]

Would love to see this. My company has a significant number of clients still on IE11.

[Rbudhiraja]

Our projects are with the government of various countries and more than 8o% of them are on IE. We really want to switch to cypress and waiting for IE compatible version.

[jonasms]

Hey, is there an update on this since Feb 2020?

My co is also considering migrating off of Cypress because we'll need IE11 support in the near-future.

[bahmutov]

There is some work we are doing on support Safari. There is no movement on supporting IE11 for now

[yaffol]

IE 11 support is still relevant for my organisation - we support modern chrome/firefox/edge and Safari version 9+ and IE 11. The comment from @gtrufitt about screen readers is also very relevant.

[cuauhtlahuac]

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.

Where I work all departments still use IE for secure reasons

[davidcarboni]

IE 11 support is actually going to become more important for us after end-of-life.

Because development will no longer naturally check that changes work in IE, we'll need to rely on something in CI to flag issues.

[an1meshk]

@jennifer-shehane Please update whether IE 11 got prioritized and any other details.

I'm starting to used Cypress in my React app and eagerly looking for more browser support, and IE 11 is of the most needed. As a major chunk of my customers are on IE11 :(

[cscheffauer]

+1 for IE11 support!

[Vondry]

I would also like to test in IE (at least IE 11).

[khotsoshomang]

IE11 testing is needed in my organization. We have been using Cypress for the past 2 years

[ladyflasheart]

The organisation I work for is currently looking at using Cypress for E2E testing, but lack of IE11 support is currently the biggest factor pushing us towards other options such as webdriver io or TestCafe. Our applications are primarily in the healthcare sector where many users are obliged to use IE11 still and this is unlikely to change any time soon.

[06kellyjac]

I'm glad so many others are also expressing a need for this feature in but please just thumbs up the initial post. There are a lot of people watching this issue and every time there's a +1 comment and or mentioning they need IE11 for customers, with no movement on the actual issue it gets a bit annoying.

Thanks

[koenbouw]

+1 , and we still need to maintain it for a long time after EOL so this update would greatly improve our ability to catch issues. Thanks for all the great work you do!

[Laksh47]

+1, this would eliminate the need for manual testing just for IE11

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/05/19/the-future-of-internet-explorer-on-windows-10-is-in-microsoft-edge/

[Pedro-Puga]

Are there any updates on the ie11 support or any workarounds?

[Mouvedia]

Are there any updates on the ie11 support

@Pedro-Puga It has been requested for more than 3 years and #5224 has been closed so don't hold your breath. There's no reason to not prioritise a top 5 issue in terms of 👍 .

[LiteSun]

+1 for IE11 support

[philiptyler]

My company works in Healthcare with Epic and Cerner (Which run in 90%) of US hospitals. Both of these software host their apps in IE11. This unfortunate browser is not going away anytime soon

[Yaco-Lee]

+1 for IE11 support! I also work for a Healthcare company and most of our users still use IE. Thanks for considering this!

[Arpita-NDSC]

I also work for a Healthcare company and we have been thinking about using Cypress in our new project. But without the IE11 support, I cannot have a conversation about benefits of adopting this great tool! Please consider this request. Hoping to see the IE browser support soon. Thanks!

[VincentPuget]

+1 for IE11 support

[forzaturian]

We are testing in IE and would be great if Cypress will support that browser.

[ebrooks42]

As a financial technology firm that needs to support other business' hardware, IE support would be extremely useful. We can control what our direct customers use to access our sites, but we cannot force our business partners to update their corporate browsers.

[adamretter]

For our customers that support Windows users, not having support for IE 11 is a deal-breaker. We have used Cypress for many things in the past and enjoyed it, however for those customers we are having to identify a different solution as more than 50% of their users are still on IE11 sadly.

[tux-rampage]

Support for InternetExplorer has Ended officially by Microsoft. IE has (finally) reached end of life and imho this issue can be closed.

[sscotth]

@tux-rampage That is not accurate. You are referring to support under mainline consumer versions of Windows 10 only.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/internet-explorer-11-desktop-app-retirement-faq/ba-p/2366549

Windows 7 ESU, 8.1, and 10 Enterprise channels end next year and LTSC for 10/Server/IOT go until Jan 2029. IE Mode in Edge is a whole different story.

[tux-rampage]

@sscotth Thanks for the clarification I was not aware of. So it seems we do not get rid of that Zombie-Browser 😞

[jennifer-shehane]

We're closing this issue since IE11 is retried and officially out of support as noted in this blog post from Microsoft.

If you have a case where you would like to support testing for IE Mode in Edge or some other case surrounding IE support, we suggest opening a new issue for tracking so that we can better prioritize that work separate from IE 11 support outright (which this issue was tracking).