[matthewmacleod]

This is such a stultifyingly stupid attitude it's hard to know where to begin, or to understand how you can be effective as a developer.

Let's be clear – if you develop a service on the web, and a significant proportion of the users or target market uses IE8—enough that there's a positive ROI—then you are making a poor business decision by refusing to support it.

[kriswill]

If you have significant resistance to upgrading from Windows XP or IE8, then you need to charge more for your product. Let's face it, maintaining websites on older browsers that have poor standards support is expensive.

I maintain such a web application myself. I work primarily on OS/X as my main development machine, and run various windows versions in virtual box in order to test these older browsers. Since the feature is usually completed using modern browsers up-front, there almost always a QA glitch that has to get worked out on IE8, chewing up another 20-30% of the total time of the project. Time that costs everyone in the business time, energy and pain. Think about that; 30% of the cost of development to support < 3% of the users.

When the large web companies like Google and Facebook remove support for these legacy browsers, every web developer on Earth cheers. Every instance of IE8 that is snuffed from existence is more time we can spend on creating great software features, and not wasting time back-porting.

[swartkrans]

I'm doing just fine as a developer. What you think is a stupid attitude is shared by pretty much everyone I work with, and others as well. From managers down to individual engineers. It's an attitude shared by many startups too in the bay area. People are either developing mobile apps for iOS or Android, or web apps for Chrome and Firefox, and probably Safari if they care about mobile.

IE updates come in too slow, longer than once a year - it's been a year since IE 11, and IE 12 is not even on the near horizon. Chrome and Firefox have had how many updates since then? Even Safari has updated in that time. Windows 10 is slated for release after April 2015, that's a year and a half since their browser has been updated!

IE selectively implements standards for business reasons and IE has a history of versions sticking around for long periods of time.

IE's developer tools, even in IE 11 are horrible. They're not even a shade of what webkit, blink and mozilla based browsers offer.

Finally, and the most damning of reasons: you need to have a Windows machine or a slow and painful (and expensive) virtualization service to test IE if you don't use Windows to develop. We all use macs, if someone isn't using a mac they're more than likely using some linux distro. I haven't worked with a developer that used Windows as their main development machines in 5 years, and in that case they were actually developing a windows application.

IE doesn't deserve our attention, users can install a different browser or deal with it, but I haven't heard a user complain about it, at all. Once in a long while someone might ask, sheepishly, and not make a big fuss about it when we tell them that we don't really support IE.