End of Internet Explorer Support for Telerik & Kendo UI Web Components

After much consideration, we will follow Microsoft’s lead and end support for Internet Explorer in our web and reporting libraries. Learn more about this decision and what it means for you.

With the current update, we would like to announce the plans and provide details about our decision to end the support for IE in the Telerik and Kendo UI components, Telerik Reporting and Report Server with the upcoming release R1 2023 (due in mid-January 2023).

What Does End of IE Support Means?

When a browser is officially supported in Telerik and Kendo UI libraries and tools it means:

• Every new component and feature is tested in this browser
• Automated regression testing is done in this browser
• Issues logged by our users and internal testing will be logged for a fix

So, the announcement of ending Internet Explorer support means that starting with R1 2023, the Telerik and Kendo UI products will not be tested against any version of Internet Explorer, nor will there be specific bug fixes for Internet Explorer.

It is important to note that for any teams that still need to support IE 11 officially, you can always get access to previous releases to continue supporting this browser. These earlier versions are very stable and still contain between 80-100+ UI components with tons of features.

Affected Products by End of IE Support

The current update affects the following Telerik and Kendo UI product lines:

• Kendo UI for jQuery
• Kendo UI for Angular
• Kendo UI for Vue
• KendoReact
• Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC
• Telerik UI for ASP.NET Core
• Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX
• Telerik UI for JSP
• Telerik UI for PHP

The last release with support for IE 11 within our web-based UI components will be the one from December 7, 2022.

• Telerik Reporting
• Telerik Report Server

The last release with support for IE 11 within Telerik Reporting and Report Server will be the service pack release due on November 9, 2022.

Making the Decision

While Internet Explorer (IE) 11 was the last major version of Internet Explorer and on June 15, 2022, Microsoft announced end of support for IE and encouraged customers to move to Microsoft Edge, we still put a lot of thought and consideration before making the decision.

We know that there is still a contingent of not only our customers but also a portion of enterprise applications out there where IE is the standard browser across an entire company. We’ve also been chatting with customers and active users of all of our web-based UI components and the number of customers needing IE support has been decreasing every year. Most customers currently supporting IE 11 and below are also working toward migrating to another browser and dropping IE support themselves.

We are aware that for those of you who need to continue to support IE in the future, this news is a cause for concern. However, we believe that this is the right time to make this decision.

As a bit of a peek behind the curtain, maintaining IE support throughout nine UI libraries creates overhead in the components’ code (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). The further back you go with Internet Explorer versions, the more you find polyfills and workarounds requiring large chunks of code to get some features working in Internet Explorer.

There are also features that have been requested throughout the years that we have been unable to introduce to Internet Explorer users. As an example, the Sticky Columns feature of any of our Data Grids is a highly sought-after feature that was added using modern browser APIs and support for more modern CSS standards, but very difficult to recreate in Internet Explorer where many standards we take for granted today are not supported.

While we have gradually started to add these features to our components with the understanding that certain customers cannot take advantage of the feature, any such decision still comes with additional overhead and delays to ensure that we are 100% confident in what we can or cannot do for IE.

Internet Explorer 11 Ends Support Across the Globe

Beyond what we covered above, there are also industry trends supporting this decision as even Microsoft itself has started to end support for IE 11 in its own products.

As of August 17, 2021, Microsoft 365 apps no longer support IE 11. While desktop applications are not counted here, dropping support for IE for a flagship web-based product is a big shift in browser support.

On October 1, 2021, Google Search no longer supports Internet Explorer 11. While Google has provided some fallbacks to ensure that the basic aspects of searching can still work, this still marks the end of IE 11 support in the world’s largest search engine.

Additionally, IE is sitting at less than 1% market share across desktop browsers.

While this does not represent the entire world and every online service, these are still important statistics and moments to keep in mind when discussing browser support in 2023 and beyond.

Your Feedback Is Needed

If you or your team want to understand how this update affects your current development efforts, or you just want to let us know your feedback about dropping IE support in the future, feel free to post in the comments below or reach out directly to our support team.