Ionic 5 and Internet Explorer 11

I have been developing cross-platform apps for several years with Ionic (Angular), and my client requires compatibility with Internet Explorer 11. Versions 3 and 4 of Ionic worked fine in IE 11 (with a few tweaks and workarounds).

Version 5 of Ionic does not work in IE at all. I have tried all of the starter projects, and several Ionic 5 samples that I found online. Even the Ionic documentation website doesn’t load in IE 11.

My question: Is there a polyfill that will allow Ionic 5 to work on IE 11? If not, is there a way to get Ionic CLI to use the starter projects for Ionic v4?

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Ionic 5 does not support IE 11, as we have listed here in our docs.

IE 11 usage is extremely small and the browser itself is no long receiving updates.
Much like the days of Android 2.3, we drop browser support once a platform has such a small usage and is no long being updated.

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@mhartington Thanks for your reply. Internet Explorer is still very popular in corporate settings. There are a lot of legacy web applications in existence, so some of my clients are still using IE by default. I often need to build apps that work on web and mobile with a single codebase which is why I use Ionic.

I am aware that IE support was dropped in Ionic 5. However the current version of the docs also say that IE was not supported in Ionic 4 which is not exactly true, and a prior version of the docs said that it was supported (see the Wiki version history). In reality, Ionic 4 worked fine with a few minor CCS tweaks and the occasional workaround.

I believe my issue is still valid: The current Ionic CLI does not allow me to generate a new project from an Ionic 4.x starter template. Running ionic start lets me pick an Ionic 3 template, but there is no selection for Ionic 4 templates.

It would be great if Ionic CLI would give me the option to pick an Ionic 4 starter template. I have seen other users raise compatibility issues when moving up to Ionic 5. For example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60744625/create-ionic-project-of-an-older-version-using-ionic-cli

If that is not possible, I would like to know if there is a polyfill that was previously included in Ionic 4 that has been omitted in Ionic 5. Perhaps restoring this polyfill would allow us to keep some backward compatibility for IE even though Ionic doesn’t officially support it. Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks.

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Starting with V4, we follow semantic versioning. Meaning that there is no V4 project or v5 project, just Ionic. So we will never provide a project type for past releases.