[wccrawford]

'Tech' is just too broad. If you're developing for KDE, then ignoring IE is very safe. If you're developing an addon for Visual Studio, then I'd probably not ignore IE.

For a generic 'tech' answer, I'd make sure the basic functionality works on IE, if ugly, and concentrate on Firefox and Chrome. (And if you do, Opera and Safari usually work without changes.)

[sharan]

In the same vein, this applies to demographics outside the 'Tech' world too. We build several products for a film festival market. Our support for IE is very product specific even within this niche domain and not something you would risk generalizing without testing the hypothesis out yourself.

For example, two of our products are (i) A film submission form field and (ii) A schedule for the screenings at the festival.

With basic IE support for both, we noticed <3% of the traffic using IE for the "Submission forms" and ~40% of our traffic to the "Schedules" use IE for a festival in Phoenix.

In hindsight this makes sense. Most people submitting films are the filmmakers or their crew- think Apple's primary target market, hence Safari and FF is what we see a lot of. We've stopped incremental updates for IE on the submission form as long as it remains functional.

However, people looking at schedules are at their enterprise jobs possibly in Phoenix during the day and trying to figure out what films to catch after work. That might explain the high prevalence of IE.

While it is obvious in hindsight, these are not assumptions I would be willing to make without looking at hard data specific to my product. Regardless of whether it's Tech or Filmmaker centric.

Edit: Clarity.

[paulirish]

If you're making the decision to unsupported IE completely (or just IE6, etc), it's wise to offer the Chrome Frame plugin to any IE users that come along: http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-gett...

Within the last two weeks code was checked in to allow non-admin level installs, so when that debuts everyone that gets prompted can actually install it.

[miketaylr]

And for users who choose not to install it, do they get a modal prompt for every page load?