[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Remove html5shiv? (Issue #3367)

Andy Allan notifications at github.com
Wed Nov 17 11:29:18 UTC 2021


I think we could remove the `html5shiv` javascript library. My motivation is because it keeps randomly failing the CI builds because of some issue that I haven't tried to debug. Although removing it might just uncover the same issue with a different file, so it's not guaranteed to be the solution.

I'd also like to remove it because I don't think it's necessary any more. [It was added in 2013](https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/commit/b92cb5b7729287d0256bbe915bfb99ef27d7b940) to support [IE8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8), which was originally released in 2009 and superseded by IE9 in 2011. Widespread IE8 support was ended in January 2016 and completely ended in 2019 for POS systems (tills, self-service checkouts etc). So ignoring those, it's been almost 6 years since it was supported and over 11 years since IE9 was released.

CanIUse shows that html5 semantic elements (which is what we use it for, I believe) is [universally supported nowadays](https://caniuse.com/html5semantic).

I'd like to hear if anyone thinks that it's still worth supporting IE8, and also to see if the sysadmins have any usage stats for this era of browsers. If not, I can make a PR to remove `html5shiv`, along with the `es5` shim that has the [same range of detected browsers](https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/ad0cfee788a18704d7924d6b4ea7d2f27ad1934c/config/initializers/browser.rb#L4-L10) (and support via [caniuse](https://caniuse.com/es5)) and therefore the same reasoning as above. 



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