In order to understand how best to kill IE11, we need to look back to how 2 previous versions of IE met their fate: IE6 and IE8. IE11 needs to die so that module authors can ship small, faster ES6 by default, which benefits all of us! Even if our own app code is written in ES6+, most of the modules we rely upon are still targeting IE11 and ES5, and bring along bloated code and polyfills. The web has always worked on the principle of progressive enhancement, so this normally wouldn’t be a problem, but the average JS app now leverages packages from the npm registry, and we find ourselves in a weird place. IE11 is the last mainstream browser that does not support ES6, a major update to JavaScript. This phrase has been uttered by countless software developers throughout the ages, but never has that statement been truer than it is right now.
