If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox.
If they are corporate users, I would be about now announcing that as Micirosft are EOL'img these IE versions only IE 11 and upwards will be supported. I'd probably give a grace period of 3 months officially, and depending on which can clients are affected I'd possibly give them 4-5 months to upgrade.
That's not a very good way to run a commercial entity. And it is also why developers should not be making the call about which browser to support and which not.
The reason why is that the fixed cost of a business are that: fixed. The profit is usually over-represented in the last few percentage points of the people using the service or buying the products so if you lop off some arbitrary percentage at the top that 15% of your users might be 80% of your profits. That's a very quick way to die.
Every browser has security issues. And as a business it is not up to you to decide what browsers people use, the best you could do is inform them but the decision is up to them.
It is extremely rare that the cost to support a browser outweighs the economic importance of those using those browsers. If it is then you are probably too small an entity to matter anyway, but as soon as your IE6 users are numerous enough that you can assign a percentage to the population you would probably be well advised to simply serve them rather than to attempt to force them to upgrade, if they haven't done so yet they either have very good reasons or you won't be able to convince them anyway.
I don't need to 'cite' what I can see with my own eyes from the stats of my payment services provider. Browsers are very easily released, they take a very long time to die. This is one reason why I tend to keep things simple, this vastly reduces the amount of resources required to make something work on a lot of different platforms and browser combinations.
Of course if your web app relies on all kinds of sexy stuff then you're going to have to convince yourself that those people don't matter.
>I don't need to 'cite' what I can see with my own eyes from the stats of my payment services provider.
Your original statement was broad and general, not qualified. Your anecdotal evidence is not sufficient to support this claim.
In the context of the discussion about supporting IE 8,9 and 10 and using your terminology flexbox (which IE 8-10 doesn't support) seems to be "all kinds of sexy stuff" and "not keeping things simple". Right, got it.
Suit yourself. One thing I do know: if you are serious about commerce you can't afford to lose customers that you've spent a lot of money to acquire it tends to wreak havoc with your spreadsheets.
> You could be a liar, idiot, troll, or just really love IE.
You omitted the possibility that I might be right, am not an idiot, am not prone to either lying or trolling and absolutely detest IE (and have not used windows for a really very long time).
> Why would anyone take your word for it.
Please don't. Ignore me and whatever I write here on the off chance that there is a grain of truth in it and that it will make you money.
Forgive me if I did not anticipate the Spanish inquisition demanding proof for something that to me simply makes good sense. Feel free to offend your users, to limit your products to function only with the latest browsers and to spend your marketing money to attract people that can then not use your product.
As someone who has taught himself development after more than ten years in entrepreneurship, marketing, advertising and strategy, I find you arguments too simplistic, with no regard to strategic tradeoffs. A successful business needs to be able to "fire" some of its clients to gain competitive advantage or increase operational efficiency. And sometimes those clients are users with old browsers.
Branding a request for proofs to general, overarching statements as personal prosecution (Spanish inquisition, really?) is a sign of discourse grounded in ideology, not practical considerations.
This is a forum, not a scientific paper. If you want to have everything cited and backed up by independent review by peers and so on I suggest you communicate by paper only, this is a discussion forum and as such I'm not required to provide you or anybody else for that matter with whatever they demand. I'm not exactly on your payroll.
If you choose to interpret that as ideologically grounded discourse then I think that says a lot more about you than it does about me.
This applies only for a diminishingly small amount of large corporations and is not applicable to absolute majority of HN startups/bootstraps/side projects.
Bootstrappers (when they are small) and side projects can ignore the smaller percentages because they are still validating their concepts. For side projects this goes even more because they are usually not commercial in nature.
Why would it have to be applicable to the 'absolute majority of HN startups/bootstraps/side projects' to be useful information?
I can speak to the fact that on the ecommerce site I work, only 1-2% of users are on older IE, but they account for many thousands of dollars of sales.
I am working at a Fortune 100 financial company currently, IE8 support is already retired, and IE9 in the next month or so. This being a numbers based decision.
Location yes.. mostly U.S. customer acquisition. As for age, skewed towards middle/older demographic, but that's true of most financial companies. That said, more mature users are more likely to be using an iPad (with a current OS) than any version of IE.
It's pretty clear you're not a developer (or wouldn't be for long).
There are two really bad decisions here:
1) You are driving away up to 15% of people who actually use your product. How much would you spend to acquire that many active users? It's easier to keep existing users than acquire new users.
2) Sending users through a ticket system for errors you could have prevented with a simple warning is a bad experience for them and far more work for you. And most users will silently disappear instead.
I feel inclined to agree. These kinds of decisions are the ones that get you in deep trouble when the vocal minority starts to scream. It really is very trivial to at least give some sort of message, warning or guide to upgrade when attempting to use a web product with an incompatible browser.
Depends on your user base. In my current application/site, our IE < 11 userbase combined is under 5% and declining. IE8 has already been dropped, and IE9 soon. The product I work on is directly related to customer acquisition at a financial institution. So I'd say it's a pretty safe bet the numbers have been run thoroughly.
disclaimer: my opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
It's easy to say this stuff, less easy to implement in a business. It depends on your demographic and your content. Take B2B sales or B2B SaaS. Enterprise users are THE main reason for crappy old browsers in my experience, so the real question becomes...
Are you really willing to take a 10% hit on sales?
You can announce EOLs until the cows come home (Microsoft has and look how well it has done them). If your product stops working, they'll complain at you and then cancel their contract and find another provider who will support them.
I'm speaking from a gruelling 15 years experience developing enterprise SaaS. We've only just dropped IE6. It'll be years before IE8 goes away.
It's the 80/20 rule for me. Think about the type of client (individual user/corporation) that is still using < IE 10. I'd wager that they're well paying, yet difficult to deal with. They're entities who live in a legacy world. I've worked in those places, and honestly I won't develop software for anything but the first-most and second-most recent platform, because I want to target people like me. People who care about value over cost. People who value time over money.
Entities who use legacy software have more problems than their browser. It's symptomatic of a much larger issue, and I love being able to filter them out!
> It's the 80/20 rule for me. Think about the type of client (individual user/corporation) that is still using < IE 10. I'd wager that they're well paying, yet difficult to deal with.
At an entity level, they may be difficult to deal with, but at the level of an individual in the organisation they know their company has problems. These people move around, and personal relationships are really important long term. This is my main motivating factor.
As long as the client pays (20% of revenue...) and there are no other risks, I'm happy to employ a front end developer who has probably has years of experience making IE6/7 degrade somewhat gracefully. If it were my own product, my own time, my own cost, absolutely not, but if sales were assured with this type of customer, sure.
This is a personal opinion. No one client is the same. I find it interesting to contrast 2 clients I work with who are in differing fields of the same space: (massive names in) financial services: One does QA on only the latest stable version of major browsers (down to Opera, my personal favourite) browser on Windows and Mac; The other does QA on any browser or platform with 2% visitor share (measured by visitors to their website), and also accommodates customers who may be on something obscure but the customer demands it. The former's approach sounds pretty aggressive r.e. serving, or not serving, the customer, but the latter's caused them to avoid abandoning a really backward platform for 5+ years for all customers. Swings and roundabouts. Interesting how we take varying judgments.
And then when your clients don't renew, your revenue is significantly affected, you have to lay off staff, you have a realization that this works in an ideal world, but we don't live in one.
i don't know...
how much is the cost to develop an application to cover 100% of the available desktop browsers? maybe use that value to improve mobile target make more sense at this point?!
It really, really depends on your site's demographic.
Example: skin care website, they sell women's beauty and anti aging products. Their demographic is 15% IE8, but you know who are most likely to buy their products? Mature women, who are also more likely to be the ones in that 15%.
The next part of that puzzle was when they launched into China. China has a huge population still on XP and IE8. Literally millions of uniques from IE8. We even had a percentage from Netscape!
Fortunately the agency handling them was smart enough to research the demographic in both instances, but many agencies won't. They will brazenly force their opinions on their users who frankly, don't give a crap how you feel. They just want it to work so they can buy stuff.
You have to view every hit as a customer. Imagine if Walmart stopped letting in 15% of customers.
I would think mature women would be the ones more likely to be using an iPad/iPhone. I've worked in several positions where the demographics are skewed towards middle age, and the use of the iPad alone is far larger than IE<11.
Sorry I probably worded that poorly. In their sample they found that those in the 15% were normally mature women.
This isn't to say the majority of mature women use IE8 or that only mature women use IE8, just that they were over-represented inside that 15% and they were purchasing customers.
You are right that iPads and iPhones are the majority of their demographic.
> I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade
People using your product are discussing it on review sites, on social media, with friends/family, etc.. If you silently give some of them a broken product, a few will contact support; but I imagine most will assume your product is just low quality. So that's the word they'll spread.
For corporate users: well, you'd need to talk with your customers. They might be facing a seriously expensive upgrade process, and could be extremely unhappy to hear you're setting an arbitrary deadline for them.
While I completely get where you're coming from, realistically this can be very messy. You'd quickly find that an increasing number of your support calls were from those users having issues. 15% doesn't sound like a lot, but 15% of a million people is 150,000 people.
So, you'd succeed in angering a lot of customers. Much better to try and inform all of your customers (not just corporate) of the upcoming changes, and provide support materials for them to follow while giving them a reasonable timeframe to do so.
Maybe you should use conversion metrics combined with usage statistics weighted against trending and flow relative to feature enhancements and capabilities instead of any raw value against general hits?
Each business is different, and even then different areas of a product can have differing requirements and needs. What is 15% for you, may be <2% and declining for others. My current and former positions see iPad users in greater numbers than any other single platform/browser, as an example. It may be better served to create features that work for the larger audience and other platforms easily supported than grasping at a fraying edge.
It's not as if web developers like supporting broken, outdated browsers. It's done because without the users using those browsers, the business would be worse off.
There are lots of intermediate steps like warning about an inferior experience, but at this point it's necessary to test most websites on at least a few versions of IE9.
I've found that using react I've had very easy compatibility with older IE, etc. The only thing I've had to do is install a polyfill or two.
If they are corporate users, I would be about now announcing that as Micirosft are EOL'img these IE versions only IE 11 and upwards will be supported. I'd probably give a grace period of 3 months officially, and depending on which can clients are affected I'd possibly give them 4-5 months to upgrade.