Web Tools #453 - IE11 to Edge, JS Utilities, SVG, React Native

I hate the fact that in 2022 we're still occasionally bringing up the remote possibility that a user might be visiting your web pages — or worse, your web app! — using an old browser like Internet Explorer 11.

If you notice traffic in your browser logs from IE11, there is something you can do that's been set up by Microsoft (you've heard of them, right? They're that 1990s dot-com that caused this whole debacle in the first place).

The Microsoft Edge docs include an article entitled Move users to Microsoft Edge from Internet Explorer. As the article describes:

"When an Internet Explorer user goes to a website that's incompatible with Internet Explorer, Windows can automatically redirect the user to Microsoft Edge. Only websites that are part of the Need Microsoft Edge list are redirected."

In order to get on the "Need Microsoft Edge" list, simply follow the instructions under the heading "Request an update to the Internet Explorer compatibility list". Once approved, your website will appear in this public XML file. Notice that Google has added 21 of their domains and apps to the list.

When that's in place, users on IE11 who open your Microsoft-approved URL will be automatically instructed to upgrade to MS Edge to view the page. This means you don't have to include any old-school IE conditional code to display a special message for those users. And if I understand correctly, if the user already has Edge installed, then the page will automatically be redirected to open in Edge.

For more details on this, see the original article along with this Tweet thread where I first heard about it, and this Stack Overflow question/answer that explains the mechanism behind how this works.

Now on to this week's tools!