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by negativeview 4245 days ago
Does that 20% come from your own stats or a third party? Most of the third parties look at worldwide market share. IE8 is disproportionately represented in third-world countries which you may or may not care about in your business.

Best I can tell IE8 is somewhere around 6% in the US (these numbers are rough to find because most of the places that collect statistically significant numbers charge for the info). On my site (which centers around a first-world disposable-income-heavy hobby) IE8 is basically non-existent. Your mileage may vary.
2 comments
JohnTHaller 4245 days ago
On my largest site with a couple million visitors a month, IE makes up about 16% of site visitors. About 25% of those are using IE8. So, about 4% overall. I specifically ensure that the site still works in IE8 and up and was still quite functional on IE7 when I last looked.

Anyone not ensuring their site works on IE is leaving money and customers on the table. Note that it doesn't have to look exactly the same, but it should still work and allow customers to learn, buy, sign in, subscribe, etc.

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ulisesrmzroche 4245 days ago
It depends on your market. I've worked on apps that have never even seen a visitor using internet explorer at all. This happens all the time in b2c software. So that analogy of leaving money on the table is not very realistic.
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JohnTHaller 4245 days ago
Of course, it varies. But there are far more users of desktop IE than desktop Safari in the US, for instance. So, once your product spreads beyond early adopters, iPhone users and Mac users (all of which are the minority of the market by large margins in each case) it's important that your site already works with the new visitors as word spreads.
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negativeview 4245 days ago
It's not just early adopters vs late adopters. And nobody is saying to disregard all of IE, only very old versions.

We're talking about dropping support for a browser that is mostly used on a thirteen year old operating system that even Microsoft has dropped support for.

My site is unlikely to ever have a significant number of IE8 users. It revolves around a nerdy hobby that people easily spend $500/year on, often in big chunks. They aren't letting their tech get that out of date.

I fully admit that this isn't every market, but you absolutely CAN make decisions about your specific market and decide that IE8 just simply is not and never will be worth it.

On the other hand, there are certain markets that will probably have to worry about IE8 for ten more years.

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ulisesrmzroche 4244 days ago
I'm building an app that caters to the 18-29 market in the US. I've yet to see someone use IE. It's all about market type.
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yazaddaruvala 4245 days ago
Always a great site.

http://www.theie8countdown.com/

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negativeview 4245 days ago
Yup, and that site is showing half of the quoted amount of traffic. It also doesn't say where it gets its data, so I'm unsure...
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