Hello all,

Starting in April 2023, MediaWiki will end Grade A support for browsers that do not implement ES6 JavaScript.[0] This mostly affects the small number of Internet Explorer 11 users. A very small number of iOS users who have not upgraded to iOS 10 (released in 2017) are also affected.

Users with these browsers will still be able to browse and contribute to the projects. Enhanced features will become unavailable. For example, the 2010 wikitext editor will not appear, scripts and gadgets will not operate, and notification buttons will take you to a page rather than open a pop-out.

This change will affect fewer than 0.1% of page views to Wikimedia wikis. We previously raised the standard (from ES3 to ES5) in April 2017.[1]

Providing JavaScript for IE 11 and other ES5 browsers adds a significant maintenance burden. It also hinders site speed for all users. Microsoft ended its official support for Internet Explorer 11 in June 2022,[2] and entirely removed it from Windows 10 in February 2023.[3]

This change will land in the development branch used on all Wikimedia wikis this April, to be released as part of MediaWiki 1.41 around November 2023.

Please help carry this message into your communities. (Tech News will announce this change as well.)

For details about the JavaScript-less experience, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Compatibility#Browsers

[0] https://caniuse.com/es6 listing browser support for ES6 [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128115 [2] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/05/19/the-future-of-interne... [3] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/internet-explorer...

Yours,