I think the reason for the IE8 support is that there are still lots of old windows machines used in china. And if you think IE8 is bad, have you ever had to support IE6? ;-)

IE 5.5 with no box models would be a contender [1]

At Social Amp (2012), I was making cross domain single-page applications for sites like 1-800-Flowers, where we had to support back to IE6, but, since a tag was missing from the main website, we had to do some hacks to "shore up" IE6 so the padding would be there.

It's feasible to have some pretty sweet JS (backbone.js, easyxdm) on IE6. The limitation came from the engine's performance, stylesheet and js caps, and really strict rules on, dangling commas (memory is a bit fuzzy in which instances, but it'd crash our whole script). In some cases, there'd be no errors, and it'd just freeze it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bu...

Border-box is arguably more useful than content-box, so the IE5.5 is not a huge deal. You can make other browsers act like IE5.5.

Back in the day it was quite a PITA though.

People who say this rarely have tried using a SPA on IE8. As the OP said, you'll provide a better experience giving them a pain ole server rendered app.

> IE6

Jesus... And I thought IE11 was bad (enterprise SaaS such as Salesforce is dropping its support already).

I’ve tried to run IE11 debugger on Virtualbox and it was slow as molasses.

> I've spent way too many hours of my life learning quirks of the horrible piece of garbage that is IE8

Son, let me tell you about Netscape 4...

But Chrome and Firefox are IE8 contemporaries. IE8 was just abysmal considering its competition.

Making a site written in React work without JS is quite an endeavor. If you’re not just using it for some progressive enhancement (and frankly, that seems a dying art), then it’s either a whole new backend or trying to be “isomorphic”.

The latter is somewhat difficult in an environment where IE8 is a factor (node as enterprise backend software is often a no-go).

You say isomorphic almost like you dismiss it.

I structured my site so that, in the worst case, the user has a plain old site of HTML + CSS and lots of hyperlinks that work just fine. My drop down headers default to pages that show the drop down content.

The embarrassing part was I had a simple bug affecting a sizable chunk of my user-base. In a certain browser, no code would run. But I never received a single complaint, because no one noticed. Sure, some fancy extras didn't work, but they are used to that with that particular browser. The information and required functionality was there. And I didn't have to write it in both PHP AND Javascript.

You can use Java/nashorn for server side rendering of react.

... you can also use react for server-side rendering of react

It looks like these guys are from China, where ie8 support still makes sense. It's still used a lot there unfortunately.

I still remember the horror when I learned the Sharepoint 2010 site i was pulled off React/Typescript for only supported IE8. And then learning the client was actually (slowly going down) our biggest source of revenue, and has so much stuff on SP2010 migrating away or upgrading SharePoint is out of the question.

I would'nt like to keep IE8 alive, sooner enterprises can't throw any more money at the problem, sooner we all get big paydays from the migration projects.

I think you underestimate how much money is made selling software to firms who still use IE8.