No traffic from Internet Explorer?

[BillalKh]

We need to know how much traffic we're getting from visitors using Internet Explorer, but using the browser dimension we can't see a single visit using IE - this can't be right. Any help in how to look into this further is appreciated.

[MandyGeorge]

The first thing I would do is use Internet Explorer and visit your website. Either record the visitor ID or do some specific/unique actions so you can identify the visit later. Then, look at your data and try to find that visit. If you can find it, then you can determine how IE is coming into your data. If you have a specific visit at a day/time to look at you will be able to tell if the data is just coming in a way you aren't expecting or if it is being excluded somehow.

If the data isn't coming in, then there is some type of capture or processing issue. Check and make sure any bot filters you have aren't filtering out all IE traffic. Check any segments, processing rules, vista rules, or any other settings applied to your data to make sure they aren't excluding all IE traffic. 

[BillalKh]

Hi Mandy,

I thought of this as well, but unfortunately have no way of installing IE at the moment.

My conclusion is that IE was depcrated so long ago that it doesn't even work on our website anymore.

Thanks for your reply.

[MandyGeorge]

I had initially assumed that you had IE available, hence checking the data from it. But like @bjoern__koth mentioned, if you can't even test the browser then the amount of traffic is probably insignificant, so it isn't worth putting too much effort into it. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Do you have a Browser Stack subscription? A lot of companies use this for mobile app testing, but you can also leverage it for Web testing.

You might be able to sign up for a free trial?

However, I agree that it's likely due to IE being old and deprecated.... I checked my data, I have all of 167 page views on IE last month... (likely most of those are bots that weren't caught by our bot rules... IE was a common User Agent used by a lot of scrapping bots)

[bjoern__koth]

Hi @BillalKh 

Internet Explorer has been deprecated sind June 2022 and has effectively 0% market share. Who ever your stakeholder is, tell him that it is so insignificantly low that no one should care anymore.

Now, to answer your question: this is likely because your website uses modern JavaScript language constructs or frameworks that are not supported and may just render the whole website unusable for Internet Explorer visitors.

Obviously hard to test without an actual browser, but this would be my best guess.

[UPDATE] To put this into perspective, this is from one of my global clients over the last 53 weeks.

Yes, that "browser" is in fact dead!

Personal opinion: any time you spend trying to answer your stakeholder's question is a complete waste!

[BillalKh]

Hi Bjoern,

The reason my stakeholder wanted the data was specifically to be able to prove to others in the org that they can drop IE in their processes.

My conclusion is the same as yours - IE probably doesn't work on our website.

Thanks for your input! 

[bjoern__koth]

I think it is safe to say, that if your developer cannot even test on that browser anymore, there is no point keeping support alive.

Also, even more critical, there are no security patches for this browser anymore. So anyone who is still using it to browser the internet, it at severe risk of infesting their computer with about every malware that is out there xD

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I agree... IE is too old to both with testing it any longer... our company hasn't tested IE for years... even before it was fully deprecated...

We have a policy to not test anything under 5% of our traffic... and IE was below that long before it was officially killed.

Any deprecated browser (unless for some reason it's being used internally for a legacy system that doesn't work with modern browser) really has no reason to continue spending time testing the functionality... I mean why not test Netscape Navigator? Or Safari for Windows (FYI, the last version was 5 and was released in 2010)...  There definitely comes a time when its not worth the effort.