| 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. |