[maggit]

As a counterexample, let's consider Google's blocking of Opera. Google routinely blocks Opera when rolling out new stuff. I kind of get it, because of your point 1.

However, they sometimes offer a "try anyway"-link and sometimes not. The times that I can not easily "try anyway" makes me dislike Google much more than the times that I "try anyway" and it ends up broken in funky ways.

Bottom line; Yes, your reputation suffers when users encounter issues. Your reputation also suffers when users encounter the big blocking issue of not being welcome at all.

[scott_w]

I think there are some differences here:

Google are trying to keep existing users happy with the "try anyway" link. This is a new business, and they have decided they don't want to support IE.

At worst, this annoys die-hard IE users, but they're not your customers anyway.

The danger of adding a try anyway link is that people will click it, then still call and complain that your site doesn't work even if you place a huge disclaimer telling them IE is unsupported.

Finally, your website may do things that not only break in IE, but can cause your users to lose data when it does break. Yes, standard backups, never deleting data rules apply. But there is time spent either recovering, or explaining to users why you won't recover data for them.

[ticks]

One thing to bear in mind is that Opera employs "web openers" who will lobby and actively help Google to support the browser (so that "try me" link may not be as superficial as it looks). That said, blocking IE is silly.

[LocalPCGuy]

How the blank would any front-end decisions result in the loss of data if the developer was any good? They may lose the data on the form they are entering if they encounter a crash, but I think the fears of IE are VASTLY overblown. I can understand locking out older versions, but it's been pretty well established that IE9 at least, can hang with it's counterparts.

(Don't take me for a Microsoft apologist, I still hate developing for IE7 and still have to do so daily. But the IE8+ (IE9+ if you rely on HTML5/CSS3 features as core elements) is really not that hard to work with.

[jdmichal]

Well, you can guarantee that die-hard IE users aren't your customers anyway if you don't even let them sign up.

[chris_wot]

Actually, your reputation does not actually suffer. You have been up-front with your customers from the very start. If you use Internet Explorer, then you should be blocked or else you will probably come against a bug that causes you to:

* potentially lose work

* have a product that you paid for that doesn't do everything you want it to do

* get frustrated when things don't work and nobody will fix them ("Why don't you care?")

Bottom line - if you don't want to support Internet Explorer, I'd say feel free to detect it and then block it. Preferrably not via a referer string, but via something you can't change like one of Internet Explorer's own bugs/incompatibilities. Like, for example, detecting document.all, or via something proprietary or broken in IE.

[luchs]

>detecting document.all, or via something proprietary or broken in IE

Please don't do that, it will also break support in browsers which emulate that behavior for compatibility with IE-only websites. document.all is actually also there in Opera.