The reason IE is still clinging on is because not enough people are making noise about it.

The less usable the net is for older browsers, the closer we move the users of those browsers to the threshold of upgrading.

It may mean more complaints from the staff to the IT department, it may mean grandma asking her grandkids why the google is broken, but if enough people are vocal about it, it will encourage upgrading.

Every time you support IE, you are slowing the uptake of newer browsers, and you are a bad person for it.

Why are XP users stuck on IE8? (I mean I think there are a myriad of options that are pretty reasonable). It doesn't cost anything or fairly little labor to upgrade to a real browser over the course of a couple years. How far do we take this, why don't we all support IE5? It's time to let it go.

You can either stick with JQuery 1.9 for as long as you want to support IE8 (hopefully not more than 10 or 20 more years).

Hi, from work, on Chrome, on XP.

>stuck on XP (and therefore IE8)

Being stuck on XP does not mean that you have to use IE8. You can still use the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or even Safari.

What is stopping those users from using Firefox?

Corporate; awareness; familiarity

Corporate: the only reason for this is because web apps and sites are written for a particular browser, and not based on standards.

Awareness: when sites don't work, they'll be aware of the problems. The truth is, most users at getting more educated about browsers all the time. It can't e helped that Microsoft has tied browser innovation and standardisation to their operating system.

Familiarity: really fairly bogus as an argument. There is really not that much different between the interfaces of Opera, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox these days!

Those are bad reasons to hold the web back. They don't adapt because they're lazy or don't know better. Making it hard to use obsolete browsers is doing them a favor. They'll like the present when they try it.