New subject: IE 8 users will get JavaScript-less experience starting January 2016

12 Nov 2015

Hey all,

Starting in January 2016, MediaWiki will end JavaScript support for
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. This raises the cut-off up from MSIE 7.
Users with this browser will still be able to browse, edit, and otherwise
contribute to the site. However, some features will not be available to
them. For example, the enhanced edit toolbar will not appear, and the
notification buttons will take you to a page rather than a pop-out.

This change will affect roughly 0.89% of all traffic to Wikimedia wikis (as
of October 2015). For comparison, 0.33% of traffic comes from Internet
Explorer 6, and 1.46% from Internet Explorer 7. Support for these was
dropped in August and September 2014 respectively.

Providing JavaScript for IE 8 adds a significant maintenance burden. It
also bloats the software we ship to all users, without proportionate
benefit. This enables us to simplify and streamline the JavaScript codebase
for all other users. Users unable to upgrade from Internet Explorer 8 will
have a faster experience going forward, based on well-tested and more
stable code.

This change will land in the development branch in January, and so will be
part of MediaWiki 1.27 (to be released around May 2016).

Tech News will announce this change as well, but please help carry this
message into your communities. In January, we will send a reminder before
the change happens.

Yours,
-- Krinkle

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