Microsoft has announced June 15, 2022 as the final date for Internet Explorer support. Corresponding with this decision, the AMP Project opened an intent to deprecate thread to discuss deprecating support for Internet Explorer. This thread was presented at a design review and has received the required approvals from the AMP Approvals Working Group.
Based on the AMP Intent to Deprecate process, the AMP Project will now start to deprecate support for all Internet Explorer versions. This has implications for developers creating AMP documents, and developers working on AMP formats.
Expected Impact
Over the course of a given week, roughly 0.05% of requests for AMP JavaScript resources are from Internet Explorer 11 user-agents or those pretending to be one. For a more fine-grained breakdown, please visit the intent to deprecate thread.
For AMP Documents and Developers Creating AMP Documents
Existing documents sometimes rely on AMP to handle Internet Explorer compatibility issues, ensuring documents render as expected (minus custom styling or scripting). This plan removes support, and as a result could introduce inconsistent behavior for Internet Explorer users.
For AMP Developers
Dropping Internet Explorer compatibility will allow the codebase to take advantage of more modern APIs in the styling and scripting layers without introducing additional testing pressure to ensure polyfills work for an increasingly out of date browser platform. The AMP Project hopes to see many other front-end frameworks adopt a similar strategy which could improve overall performance on the web for the vast majority of users.
Timeline
Over the next six weeks, visitors to AMP documents running Internet Explorer will have an additional message available on the developer console with a reminder of this deprecation policy. This message includes a link to the intent to deprecate thread. Following this period, the following release of AMP will begin to remove code associated with Internet Explorer support, and all Continuous Integration testing on Internet Explorer will cease.
Posted by Kristofer Baxter, Technical Lead for the AMP Project