[billpatrianakos]

It's totally necessary though. Developer's can't be supporting old browsers forever. And really, when we speak of "old browsers" we really just mean IE which still throws weird behaviors at you in the latest versions! When enough sites stop supporting these dinosaurs we not only give users a better experience on our sites but across the entire web.

Corporate customers can always use Chrome or Firefox on XP and if they can't then there's still Basecamp Classic for them. I think they're doing the right thing. It's a calculated risk and I think the odds are in their favor.

[untog]

It's totally necessary though. Developer's can't be supporting old browsers forever.

It's not really our choice, though. If you run an online shopping site and 40% of your customers use IE7, you should support IE7. Urge them to upgrade, sure, but if you want to actually make money you're going to have to bite the bullet and deal with old browsers.

[dmethvin]

Yep, it really comes down to money. If you are running a consumer retail site that gets traffic from Fortune 500 employees buying stuff on their lunch hour, you will either support IE7 or lose business.

Sure IE7 has problems, but they are well known problems at this point. An experienced web designer should know how to deal with them to give IE7 users a degraded but functional experience.

[huskyr]

Sure IE7 has problems, but they are well known problems at this point. An experienced web designer should know how to deal with them to give IE7 users a degraded but functional experience.

True for most CSS bugs, but if you're doing lots of Javascript you might reach a point where IE7 just doesn't cope, especially if you're doing lots of Ajax stuff. Of course, you can probably hack something 'degraded', but it does take a lot of time and might lead to difficult code with lots of hacks.

[Tichy]

Ironically, those Fortune 500 employees are actually rather unfortunate.

[billpatrianakos]

Yeah, true. I just have this dream that all web developers will band together to stop supporting "problem" browsers forcing users and browser makers to fall in line. I mean, correct me if I come off as a spoiled brat but I think they should be making browsers to suit how we build sites and not how they want us to develop them.

[hello_moto]

That's a political struggle. Not just for browser but any area: control.

[billpatrianakos]

Well you make a good point but I think you're seeing this as a case where you don't have an option. It is our choice. When you choose the browsers you're going to support you're choosing your customers. I've had to learn the hard way that a business needs to choose it's customers just as a consumer chooses their vendor. If I run American Apparel's online store I'm going to assume a younger customer base and with younger customers comes more recent browsers. If I run "motorcycleaccessories.com" I'll assume middle aged Harley riders that don't give a damn about browsers so I'll support old stuff.

Now, I hope my examples don't get people going pedantic on me. I realize I might be wrong about the audiences in those specific examples but the point still stands. In the end it comes down to 3 things:

Knowing who your customers are in general

Making a choice about which portion of those customers you really want

And finally, is supporting an old browser worth the time and effort compared to being able to put that time/energy into giving your preferred customers a far better experience

I'm partial to not supporting old browsers but I would do it if the situation called for it. There's a part of me that wants to band all developers together in not supporting anything older than IE8 with the hopes being that users upgrade and browser makers (Microsoft, looking your way) start making better browsers and browsers that, at the very least, try to get you to update if they don't do it automatically.

And let's be real here, almost all talk of compatibility centers around IE. Getting something to render properly in IE is like rewriting all your code with special classes and weird, incomprehensible "filter: progId(gibberishNoOneRemembersHere);" nonsense that might as well be another language. If only we could fix or kill (I'm happy either way) IE we wouldn't even need to have this conversation. I mean, look at the version numbers that support modern techniques in other browsers. FF, Chrome, Safari, all pretty much support anything you'd like to do without much effort from v3 or 4 up. IE? We're coming up to version 10 which is a step in the right direction but still too little too late.