| It depends on your target market. My start-up, http://www.MORExchange.com, targets mortgage borrowers. Real estate agents are an important referral channel. We're currently in an invite-only beta. But among our few hundred users, we're definitely seeing a skew towards Firefox / Webkit and away from IE. That said, the combined versions of IE are still 40% of our traffic. And I'm fairly convinced that IE share will grow as our product enters open registration. That said, we decided to abandon IE 6 support during development. Metrics so far indicate that this was the right decision. We're only seeing 2% of our requests coming from that abomination. We're also not doing anything special for IE 7 & 8. They get the uglified version of the UI sans opacity, drop shadows, gradients, rounded corners, etc. I'm setting up analytics right now to see if browser version affects our conversion rate. I'm betting it doesn't. Of course, we're not doing anything terribly unusual. We have no burning need for the canvas element, for example. So supporting IE 7 & 8 hasn't been terrible for us. I'd imagine that's a significant limitation for other start-ups. We're also a traditionally funded company. So we have the luxury of being a bit more ambitious with our initial product. If we were bootstrapping and attempting to find customer fit, I'd probably just target the latest Firefox / Webkit. |