It'll be a while, sadly. IE8-10 are still up to 25% of the browsers[0] (caniuse puts them much lower, which isn't surprising for sampling dev oriented sites). IE10 (5% of that) needs a different syntax, and 8-9 don't support it. All three support table layout[1], which is why it is still the best solution if you care about compatibility.
I bet she will when she tries to access her website at school. Schools aren't exactly keeping their browsers up to date nor are they going to install alternative browsers. It's important to think about how her audience will access her content. Since she's a student, the first viewing will almost certainly be through a school computer as she shows it off. After that, perhaps less so, but kids like to goof off at school. That's probably when they will be most willing to visit the website.
A dismissive dev's 'legacy' browser, is 25% of actual web users. You can dismiss them as legacy if you like, but there isn't a minimum age before you get told your site sucks because a quarter of people get crap when they load it.
Those versions of IE might represent 25% of web users, but any given website will probably see them as much less than 25%.
I run multiple sites, and most of them have IE (any version) as under 10% of users. One of them doesn't; IE represents ~13.5% of users on that one.
My untested theory about this is that IE users are generally less adventurous web users, sticking to sites like Gmail, YouTube, local news sites, etc.
TLDR: unless you're working on Gmail or a site where you expect to soon see the world turn up at the doorstep, it might be safe for you to mostly ignore IE.
This is true, but when these particular browser account for less than 1% of your traffic then you can make a call on whether it's worth supporting those users. Perhaps that loss is acceptable.
This, of course, is going to be different for every project and website. Each team would need to look at _their_ browser usage stats and make a judgement on what resources you want to spend on supporting the stats that you're going to see.
I agree; that's where it gets a bit tricky. You're not going to have many repeat customers who can't use your product.
You have to either be enhancing an existing product where you know that the segment in question isn't worthwhile supporting, or be prepared to estimate whether that segment is going to be meaningful for you.
Another thing to keep in mind is that sometimes the result isn't a deal-breaker. Suppose I try to get vertical centering working on one of my sites using flexbox. Perhaps the 5% IE users simply see the content of each div at the top rather than being vertically centered. Not ideal, but not the worst possible outcome, either.
Out of interest, does anyone know how flexboxes break on IE if you try to use them for vertical centering? Does the content actually just sit at the top?
The problem is that 25% of your customers could easily represent 100% of your profits. So by the time you're done with all your fixed costs and still need to turn a profit having a few % more or less users may make the difference between a company that will succeed or one that will tank.
That's why any commercial entity will be very wary of closing the door on paying users no matter how old their setup is.
Yes, if you center vertically with a flex-box, and you aren't doing anything weird with margins or overflow, and that's the only thing you do with it, you'll get non-centered results on IE8-9.
Not a problem.
But if you're only looking for that, then it seems very churlish not to use table layout, since that is the same amount of CSS and works in IE8+. There's no excuse for breaking layout in a browser if the alternative is just as simple and has no downsides.
Once you need to use flexboxes for more than vertical centering, it can cause more problems. Using it in place of inline-blocks, for example (one of its useful applications), can leave your content very weirdly laid out on older IEs.
The market share varies dramatically by niche. If you're running sites aimed at developers, you'll get very different results to a site aimed at teens on mobile, or one aimed at large blue-chip corporates.
Supporting IE < 11 shouldn't be a technical decision, I'd say. It is simply not technically difficult to do (outside of a couple of very niche web technologies). It is a business decision. So, you need to ask the CXOs if they're happy to leave those customers to your competitors to save you however many hours of dev and testing. There's a point where the answer will be 'yes'. Mostly we've passed that for IE6 now, but not always. I'm aware of one company targeting government clients, particularly in the developing world, for whom IE6 support is essential.
They are using a modern browser. Modern => something that was produced in the last couple of years.
That the computer industry still can't get stuff right and forces users into an upgrade (which may or may not work, could quite possibly lead to a borked browser or even a totally borked system leading them to have to 'upgrade' to a more modern operating system, which in turn may require them to shell out money for new hardware) is no reason to push the responsibility for the laziness of web developers onto the end users.
And if they can't upgrade, or won't, or don't want to, or don't trust you to tell them to install something?
We went through this years ago with IE6, there were always plenty of devs with variations of "screw 'em", but blaming or penalising users for their set up is a bit of a dick move, and shutting out or inconveniencing a big chunk of potential market is not a good business strategy.
There does come a point where the cost of supporting a browser exceeds the value of the people using it, but I'd be surprised if most sites have hit that for IE8 (the third most used browser, more than twice the market share of the most used firefox).
Really? You don't think his kid's peers might not have the latest IE at home? Lot's of them will be on mobile, true (though some of them will be on Android's pre 4.4 browser, which also doesn't support it fully), but if they want to check from school, then school machines are neither likely to be the latest, nor the most diligently updated.
I wasn't trying to be a smartarse, I wish flexbox was usable. But IE < 11 is still a very large player.
It isn't a very large player. Most websites will not see anywhere near 25% of IE < 11, even though that may be the global distribution. Even some of our most conservative enterprise clients have upgraded to IE 11. I'm not entirely sure how Microsoft pulled this off, but I'm impressed at how quickly they are pushing everyone to a modern browser.
If you start a new project today, there is almost no reason to care about IE < 11. By the time you get enough users that IE itself becomes a sizeable number, I am willing to bet that IE < 11 will be around 5% of users on the high end.
