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

[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.

[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).