So why block IE users and not just let them fend for themselves since you don't "support" it? Because you're still going to get people trying to use your site in IE. They're going to send you support emails and they're going to complain to people about your shitty app not working. That costs time, money, and reputation.

A disproportionate number of our most important users are running IE8. I don't know if it's because they're still on XP (and thus can't upgrade past 8) or some other reason.

I'm not an expert, but I think it's so much that IE9 auto-updates as Win7+ does a much better job of pushing updates that include new browsers.

This seems to be a common refrain here. It's missing an important caveat: "unless supporting those browsers costs more than the customers are worth". Supporting ancient IEs means things like: avoiding features that can't be polyfilled, providing XP images for CI, debugging IE issues, etc. None of these happen for free.

also it sucks.

So if you use IE when you are not forced to, you drag the rest of us down. And that frankly isn't cool.

As you grow and (hopefully) become more successful you may start running into friction from IE users who want to use your service but can't.

Once you've saturated the market of other browser users, how will you continue to grow?

When you get there I think you might regret not investing in IE support today.

What about your application is SO compelling and SO difficult to support in IE that you can afford to ignore that entire market segment?

IE already requires twice the budget - no grid, no flex, no ES8, and maintaining polyfills for all these things (if they're possible) requires maintenance and slows down build time.

Even slow moving corporates have AD managed Chrome or Edge since half the products they purchase don't work with IE.

The only reason people keep supporting it is people keep making it a big deal if something doesn't work on an unmaintained browser. We have to draw the line somewhere.

There are people who say that an experienced web developer can work around IE issues -- and they can. The problem is, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. Let me explain. The cost to make your application support IE is enormous. And I'm not just talking about the cost to make it work and feature complete in the browser. I'm talking about the cost that you could be working on other products or features that drive the business -- the stuff that really matters and delights users.

Beyond preventing you from focusing on what matters, there's also a significant amount of technical debt that has to be inherited with every IE hack you add to your code base, and in some cases supporting IE can mean saying no to certain product features that otherwise could have been possible. This means that IE is actively inflicting damage to other browsers and is in effect lowering all your users -- even if they have a good browser -- on to a least common denominator experience.

IE also hurts your customer service and support personnel. Troubleshooting IE specific issues and quirks is painful, random and at times non-deterministic. You'll likely be consulting arcane MSDN articles published in the early to mid 2000's, and in general frustrating customers and developers alike. It can affect your entire organization, keeping everyone busy working around the issues -- from your front line customer service people, to product managers and developers. It's simply amazing what damage the browser can and does do to a web company.

I also agree that IE, in any version thus far widely available, is an albatross. In Microsoft's defense, I haven't used IE10 for development purposes nor do I target it (that's because almost no one uses it and access to the browser is hard to get outside of developer previews). But even IE9 is simply too little, too late. And in too little I mean it still doesn't get all of CSS3 right (I still have to create hacks around various issues and have only marginally more confidence compared to IE8). Not to mention the fact that users must be on Vista or Win7 means many Windows users will be stuck on IE8 for years, making it even more irrelevant. By the time IE9 has finally reached critical mass, the other browsers will likely be light years ahead (Chrome major version 30 by then??). This issue with upgrade path and slow speed of innovation is cause for great concern with developing anything on IE.

Developer tools in the IE browsers are also less than stellar. Microsoft has invested large amounts of effort and time into its Visual Studio line of tools and it shows. They are generally high quality and provide an excellent developer experience for working and debugging code. In stark contrast, IE Developer Toolbar, F9 Developer Tools, and Microsoft Script Debugger seem like after thoughts. The experience is subpar in almost every category compared to working with Firebug in Firefox, built-in Firefox debugging tools, and the amazing WebKit inspector and remote debugger. In addition, the tools and usage of them is fragmented across the different IE versions (a different combination of tools is needed per version to debug issues and inspect the DOM). As far as I know, remote debugging isn't widely available for IE, in any version.

Why has this happened? I largely feel that Microsoft's lack of focus on the browser and web standards over the past 10 years, and instead it's focus on Visual Studio and .NET have led them to a serious game of catch up. The browsers themselves are inadequate, the developer tools are not high quality, and the upgrade speed and innovation path takes years. Add all this together and it's a recipe for continued issue and pain with IE - in any version. Incremental improvements may be made, but they are just that. There will always be a game of catchup to be played, along with a new bag of hacks to implement and associated organization pain.

So if you can, do it! Drop IE! Your developers, employees and customers will thank you!

I can understand not supporting legacy IE. Not supporting modern IE doesn't make sense. It seems a lot like nerd rage misdirected.

I must admit my knee jerked a little on that one. I did the "reading comments before the article" thing and was responding to what I've seen in a number of places recently which is a minor backlash against dropping IE8 support. I've seen it in a couple of places over the last ~year (since there were predictions of Google dropping support in their Docs products when IE10 is officially released). The conversation goes:

IE8 User: I'm not paying to Upgrade Windows of learning a new browser, so if you don't support IE8 I'm going away

Others: Fair enough. We wish you luck in your future endeavours.

IE8 User: Hangs around and repeats the demand to be supported in the hope that if he shouts loud and often enough he'll be given his way just to shut him up. The word "unprofessional" gets an airing at this point.

I have bee in my bonnet about IE as I have no choice but to support as far back as 6 in my day job due to some of our banking clients being stuck in the stone age metaphorically speaking... If I win the lottery I'll never touch IE again due to the hassle it has caused me up til this point, even if it becomes the greatest browser in the world!

If you don't want to support old IE, then don't support it. If you have to support it because enough of your customers still use it, then why would you want their browser to crash?

>Heck. Even Microsoft would stop spending money developing their browsers and that would certainly improve their bottom line

Are you just anti-Microsoft trolling? This doesn't follow any kind of logic. "They would sure benefit from having millions of users not use their Web browser." What?

So there's two options: 1. Innovate quickly and have access to amazing new browser features, but only cater to 60% or so of the market. 2. Support 100% of the market, but with considerable more effort (slowing you down).

Both approaches are legitimate. I prefer the first one, but the users who can't use my sites are going to want something equivalent for their outdated browser.

Supporting IE seems to me to be supporting a project that will be obsolete in many ways soon after launch, and will stay that way for quite some time.