[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.