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Bug 396838

Summary: Consider to discontinue IE7 / IE8 support in RAP
Product: [RT] RAP Reporter: Tim Buschtoens <tbuschto>
Component: RWTAssignee: Project Inbox <rap-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: mknauer
Version: 2.0   
Target Milestone: 3.0 M1   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:

Description Tim Buschtoens CLA 2012-12-18 08:56:44 EST 
To quote Wikipedia: " As of May 2012, estimates of IE7's global market share were 1.5-5%."[1]. Facebook, Youtube and Github don't support it anymore.[2]
While IE6 (which we dropped in 1.5) was packaged with the very popular Windows XP, IE7 came with the much less adopted Windows Vista. (Win7 had IE8.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_7
[2] http://www.techspot.com/news/46859-ie-market-share-slips-facebook-pulls-support-for-ie7.html

Why drop support?

IE7 is easily the most outdated, buggy browser we still support. Testing it costs time that could be better spent elsewhwere. 

Admittedly the difference between IE7 and IE8 is not great (performance aside), dropping IE8 would be the really big step (we could get rid of half the browser-switches and remove entire javascript files). IE8 is still around 10% market share, but the earlier we drop IE7, the earlier we can drop IE8.
Comment 1 Ivan Furnadjiev CLA 2014-07-21 08:25:56 EDT 
RAP 3.0 will not support IE7 and IE8. IE8 specific code has been removed form the client.