[melling]

How many times are we going to have the same argument?!?!?!?

There is always a choice. IT departments can, and do, install modern browsers on people's desktops. IE6 can run along side Chrome, for example.

The guy sitting in the cubicle doesn't have much say when the upgrade happens. When the guy in the corner office starts to feel the pain, a few phone calls are made and something gets done. If you keep pushing progressive enhancement then we can support IE7 and IE8 for another decade. Of course, the amount of Javascript that you can use on your site will be limited.

[EnderMB]

As many times as it takes for you to realise that you don't have power over everyone's IT department.

Yes, installing a browser is trivial, but people are at this offices to do work. The argument is that these people shouldn't be browsing the Internet in the first place.

The only thing keeping these dead browsers alive is legacy operating systems, and Microsoft needs to find a way to get people off of XP. If Microsoft can kill XP and get people on Windows 7 then IE6-8 are gone from the equation. This is the real battle, not whether you can be a lazy developer.

[melling]

Everyone already realizes that. Now when you realize that we do realize then we can make some progress.

Once it becomes uncomfortable enough for enough people, or the right people, then IT departments will respond. That's how many departments work. Push change out as far as possible.

As I have already explained, there's an opportunity cost for supporting legacy. Companies like Apple are quick to drop legacy, and move forward. It works quite well for them. Google doesn't support less than IE8 for their apps (are they being lazy?). They claim to only support the last two browsers. It'll be interesting to see what happens when IE10 ships.

One thing that I think would be useful is to tell people that your site no longer "officially support" browser X before you actually stop supporting it.