Why is a benefit stop supporting old browsers?

Hi everybody!

As you may know, I’ve started working full-time a few weeks ago. And last weekend I broke my left arm, so that’s why I’ve been away.

The company where I’m working is building a modern webapp, based on websockets and PWA (betweeon other technologies), and there is a debate about supporting IE11 (yes, they’re thinking to stop supporting IE11).

This remember to me an old text I wrote for an interview, and today I want to share it with you:

Let me introduce this answer with a little of history.

Gutenberg took the risk and fought against the clergy. They were opposed to the print because clerics were responsible of writing books and “protecting” the knowledge. The print would destroy its monopoly, and that wasn’t good for them.

Graham Bell had to fight against mailing companies when he created the phone. Obviously, this invention will reduce the number of letters sent by common mail, causing the angry of companies, but now, this is a necessary instrument.

Nowadays, printed media companies are fighting against online media companies because they are losing the information monopoly (like clergy did in the past, because of the print. Ironic, isn’t it?).

What does it mean?

Having this in count, IE6 and IE7 are Windows XP browsers. This means that they are (almost) 15 years old. They are old, very old. They are deprecated. In fact, Microsoft is not supporting IE6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 anymore.

We cannot support those browsers because this is the only way we can force the world to move forward. Users (and companies) are afraid of changes, and they will get stucked on a 15/20/50/100 years old technology if they are comfortable with it. In fact, we are still reading books, using a +550 years old technology.

But if we continue consenting these people/companies, we are stopping the progress. Maybe some people think they can lose some clients, money or whatever, but this shouldn’t be our focus as technology drivers.

We cannot be afraid of losing something in a figth, because if we do, we wont fight: we will just survive. And we cannot survive, we cannot stop the progress. Because if we do, we are losing the fight.

So yes, not supporting old browsers is a benefit for the progress, and that’s a benefit for the world, because that progress will make our work easier, and those facilities will return to us all those benefits we lost suring the fight.