[billpatrianakos]

I feel like people are lying to the,selves about IE9. It's still not good enough! The key words you used were that hard implying you know it's still just a little tough. Ever try to get a gradient to work in IE9? First off, when it works it doesn't render anything like it renders in any other browser, and second, you still have to jump through hoops or all your gradients will be blue even if they're not meant to be blue. Ever had to mess with progIdMicrosoft.blah.anotherThing("someMoreStuffHere");? I have. It's why IE9 still sucks.

Saying IE9 is up to snuff is like saying your scumbag uncle is cool now because instead of shooting heroin all day long he's just a raging alcoholic. I mean, yeah IE improved significantly but when you remember IE6 - 8 it's easy to look like you've improved. Are we praising IE because it just doesn't suck as much? Come on, every other browser on earth has been running circles around it for years and it's still playing catchup and it just refuses to ditch that whole "progId" thing. They go around saying "well, we do what the other guys do except we made it impossible to remember or comprehend how to do in our browser".

And I like how the guy who hasn't had to support IE for a few versions writes a post about how we're lazy. It would've meant a lot more coming from someone with experience. Recent experience, that is.

[ricardobeat]

Nobody is saying IE9 is great, but you can't deny it's good enough for most apps. It's fast, has a decent javascript engine, a hardware-accelerated canvas, some HTML5 support. Their greatest sin was leaving out text-shadow and gradients, but IE10 is just around the corner.

Even if it was complete crap, it has a 30-50% share, you can't justify killing off that much business unless you develop a Mac/Linux-centric or browser-specific app/site.

[jopt]

Be careful with market share numbers. If you use the generic market share, your implicitly assuming your user base is representative of the general online population. That's rarely the case, and it usually worth using more specific statistics even if your app isn't "Mac-centric."

[billpatrianakos]

That is true. It is good enough but good enough is no longer good enough. We've been spoiled with Firefox and now Chrome. There's nothing wrong with being spoiled either! Practically speaking, it's not a good idea to leave IE out no matter what the version. That said, I'm so glad sites are not only excluding IE but publicly bragging about for better or worse. My hope is that from this point on beginning with IE10 Microsoft adds support or better support for new html5/CSS3 technologies to the point where we think of it as an equal to other browsers. Developing for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera is trivial but still not IE even version 9. It's not about IE bashing. I don't care who makes the browser or what it's called so long as I'm not developing multiple versions of the same site just to support a single browser.

As others have mentioned, market share can be misleading and audiences count. But even so, you're still right that it's not practical to leave IE out. But since people are doing it I hope it encourages IE to take notice and improve instead of digging in their heels and insisting they're just as capable as the next browser.

The real problem however is fragmentation. I'm sure IE will improve or die in the future but Microsoft just shot themselves in the foot by restricting the amount of people who can upgrade. People often say that FF and Chrome will one day be fragmented and a drag on front end developers too but I disagree. Even older versions of those browsers support far more than than IE8 and below support and in some cases they even include features IE9 doesn't support. In the future there will be far less fragmentation of non-IE browsers because the vendors are way better at backwards compatibility. We'll easily still have to be concerned with IE7-10+ in the next five years because the number of people using them will fall at a snail's pace while market share for old versions of other browsers falls much faster. This is because many IE users simply cannot upgrade even if they wanted to while everyone else can. Nowadays Microsoft seems to be pushing updates more. Good for them. It's too little too late.

For now we can't deny IE still isn't good enough and I'm not about to congratulate them for being one step behind everyone else with each new version of IE. While its not practical to exclude Internet Explorer I hope the trend continues just so that it pushes Microsoft to continue improving the browser like it has recently. Maybe in a few years, when old versions of IE (the terrible 6-8 versions) have finally lost almost all their market share and the still shitty but far more manageable versions 9+ are all we have to contend with (and I'm sure by that time IE will finally be on a level with its competition) we can quit being "whiners" and "lazy" and "hipsters" and "elitists" and "ignorant" about supporting it.