Hello folks, thank you for the candid responses. I hear the frustration this announcement has caused and I’ll do my best to address your concerns.
First of all let me apologise for not giving the community greater warning before we made this change. Although it was mentioned in comments in the original IE11 retirement post, I acknowledge that we should have communicated this more clearly given the impact of the decision. I also regret that we didn’t give the community a chance to respond to this decision before it was actioned. We’ll be sure to share decisions like this more proactively in future.
As for the decision itself, this was a tough one. By dropping support for IE11 we are able to take advantage of modern web features to deliver better experiences faster to the majority of our users. We have many teams inside Atlassian who will continue to support LTS versions of our Server products just like our ecosystem partners, and these teams - like your teams - must freeze their usage of Atlaskit. This is a tradeoff we had to make in order to balance building for Cloud while supporting our server teams and ecosystem partners. I can assure you that we aren’t asking you to make any sacrifices that we won’t be making ourselves.
To address a few of the specific questions in this thread:
Will “critical issues” include cases where for example, a security vulnerability is found in a dependency?
@mike1 yes any critical security vulnerability will be patched.
When you are going to drop ie11 from babel config? It would be nice to get new smaller and more performant production bundle. There is a lot of bloat coming from having IE11 and ES5 as a target in your transpiler settings.
@Grzegorz we already ship an ES2019 build of all Atlaskit components alongside ESM and CJS builds.
By dropping IE11 support, what does that mean?
@satvik it means all of those things so yes, it does include using incompatible CSS features.
Thank you everybody.
The Atlassian team