[kemayo]

I'll admit it's slightly harsh. But it's probably also true for any sort of mass market web property.

At work I'm currently having to live with supporting IE8+ [1], which I'm looking forward to eventually moving on from. Alas, the traffic isn't there yet. Plus, we're being wary about dropping IE8 since it's the last official IE for Windows XP.

As you say, it's a very site-dependent issue to care about. IE tends to come along with a more mass-market audience. If your site is aimed more at a tech-savvy crowd, you're likely to be able to not care about IE.

Of course, it gets a bit self-reinforcing there! If your early users don't use IE, you might decide that it's safe to drop IE support... and now you'll never get IE users, since they'll just think your site doesn't work.

Interesting random statistic: I have a personal medium-traffic site (about 300k visits / month) aimed at a completely non-technical crowd. IE makes up about 24% of new visits, and has the lowest bounce rate of any browser. Chrome's the single biggest browser, but all the majors are too well represented to not care about supporting.

[1] http://help.deviantart.com/38/

[coldtea]

>At work I'm currently having to live with supporting IE8+ [1], which I'm looking forward to eventually moving on from. Alas, the traffic isn't there yet. Plus, we're being wary about dropping IE8 since it's the last official IE for Windows XP.

If the web property is successful enough, you can ditch IE support and they'll come with something else. Or you'll get new users to replace them eventually.

[porker]

> If the web property is successful enough, you can ditch IE support and they'll come with something else. Or you'll get new users to replace them eventually.

You're not a business person are you? No manager or CEO is going to take that approach if they can make more money off having some IE users (and a more complex/harder to maintain web app) than no IE users.

[coldtea]

>You're not a business person are you?

I started my first startup while at university undergraduate. And am working on another at the money.

So, yes, I am a business person, just not the "bending backwards" for the customer business person.

>No manager or CEO is going to take that approach if they can make more money off having some IE users (and a more complex/harder to maintain web app) than no IE users

Then those managers:

1) not only do not have any pride in what they are doing (ie. they would put out shit if they could get some more money that way, instead of having a strong opinion on what they want to sell)

2) but also they might be loosing the company money, since they don't seem to understand the notion of opportunity cost.

Sure, they might make X money if the cater to legacy browser users than if they did not. At what overall cost to the company? Some messy workarounds that have your programmers working overtime? Not using nice new technologies that will give you a leg up on the competition? Spending 40% of the companies wages to fix bugs and work around issues for a 10% minority? Not iterating faster, so that in 2 years, when IE8 is < 5%, you have your food eaten by some new company building on stuff that only the latest IE support? etc etc...

[hnriot]

But if you stopped supporting those ie8 users would it detract from your bottom line? By breaking old browsers you push those people to upgrade.

[rip747]

ahhhh the oldest argument on the internet "If you stop supporting their browser, they'll upgrade". no, they won't, they'll just stop using your service and go else where. And yes, this would hurt your bottom line.

[coldtea]

Citation needed.

I, for one, have switched tools (including browsers) several times to be compatible with stuff and services I care about.