IE8 is a complete mess in comparison to modern browsers. To support IE8 you often have to go through a lot of extra work after the site works in modern browsers to get it functional even if your not doing something particularly complex. At the very least its often a whole bunch of different CSS / replacing CSS with images to get the rendering to look decent. In addition a lot of 'Show HN' posts tend to use 'cool new tech' that just doesn't work at all in IE8. To get it functional you often have to implement an entirely different approach just for IE8. Most 'Show HN' links are MVP products, the devs just decided to release quick instead of spending a few extra weeks dealing with IE8's shenanigans.

IE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users.

If you have an analytics software that doesn't work in IE8. You lost analytics for 20-30% of your users.

And since array.prototype.slice.call is not supported in IE8, this analytics software is about 80-70% useful. And maybe even less if you have a large IE clientele.

Seems strange to me that one would limit themselves that much.

> IE8 is perfectly fine,

No, its really not, its a huge pain in the ass to support unless you handcuff yourself to its limitations.

> and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users.

Those numbers are wildly skewed by market segment. IE8 is a relic that mostly only exists on corporate controlled laptops at this point. If they aren't your target user, you can pretty much ignore them. None of the sites I work on see over 5% IE8 usage.

No, it's not perfectly fine. It's terrible and takes a good amount of extra work to get working for any mildly complex website.

Around here IE8 is at < 7% market share; if your product is slightly related to tech that's more like 0%.

I spend more time fixing issues in IE10, Opera, and the WebKit family then I do fixing IE8.

Sure it doesn't support a lot of HTML5/CSS3. But if you build a site using 100% HTML5/CSS3 then why do you even care what it looks like in anything but WebKit. Why spend 15 hours getting it to work in IE8. Let IE8 look like IE8, and the rest look like the rest. That's how it's suppose to be done.

IE8 is old, if you want to support it. You use older technologies. That's the point. If you want to use the newest and greatest you lose old support.

But to call it terrible is wrong, it is/was a solid browser.

That's the point. IE8 is old, and not 'perfectly fine' if you're creating a web-based product and not just looking for rounded corners. It was great after living with IE6, but we moved on. Even Google has dropped support for IE8 in most apps.

>IE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users.

Perhaps in some markets.

For one of the sites I write for, it's less than 5% over a large sample.

I don't understand the comment about Array.prototype.slice.call. I only see them using it to convert arguments to an array which works fine in IE8.

I thank God everyday for our outstandingly small IE population

It's not your imagination.

For Heap, it would be a bit unwise to ignore IE < 9 still since they're limiting themselves from the start.

A lot of new projects on the front page lately don't work on IE9 either. I lost count of the number of shiny new things (usually involving HTML5) that just show a plain black (/white/gray/blue etc...) screen on IE9 and I'd need to fire up Firefox or Chrome just to look at it.

To be fair, not all of these are catering to IE based browsers (and I dread to think how some of these would look on a Nokia mobile... or, heaven forbid, a BlackBerry), but they're effectively ignoring a very, very, very large percentage of users worldwide -- of not just IE -- to be first out of the gate. BlackBerry in particular is still very popular in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

That foot in the door is all important, I suppose, since the buzz will help sustain at least an initial signup for whatever it is.

The web applications in particular are exactly that. Because they're applications they're crafted to a very select set of platforms since they're executed. For better or for worse, a lot of new projects are already going in the direction of the browser as the OS.

I presume backwards compatibility will be tacked on later and maybe removed as those browsers fall further behind.

I can speak to this a little bit, actually.

Chartbeat has never supported IE, which as you say sounds like cutting off a major part of your market. Even moreso when you consider our customers which include pretty much every major publisher in the US. However what we've learned is that if your product provides enough value, people have no problem installing Chrome or Firefox or whatever.

To this day we receive pretty much no requests for IE support at all, which enabled us to build a product with heavy HTML5 (mostly canvas) and CSS3 usage.

That's very true. We don't have the same complaint about programs specifically built on one family of operating systems not working on another. That also speaks to how much we depend on the browser these days to act as an OS in a way, particularly for full featured applications that depend on (relatively) new technology.

+1 to this.

Also people need to realize that client-side library support is different from what the product's website itself supports. Chartbeat, and every analytics provider I know of supports IE for their tracking library.

Everyone, not just web startups, is sick of IE8 and earlier. As the other commenter described, it's a lot of effort. I think when it comes to bigger organizations (such as Google not officially support IE8 anymore), it's to force laggard corporate offices to at least upgrade to IE9, if not Chrome or Firefox.

In 5 years everyone is going to be complaining that people use WebKit. And why they haven't upgraded to HerpyHouse.

Oh technology...

But the most popular WebKit browser keeps itself up-to-date with unprecedented efficiency:

http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/111206-c...

Full article:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/12/06/comparing-chrome-and-fir...

This is a deal-breaker for me. I'm very interested in Heap, but an analytics tool that ignores (or breaks) a non-trivial percentage of my users is a non-starter.

I mention this because it looks like Heap devs are monitoring this thread--Heap addresses real problem for me that I'm willing to pay money to solve. Codegeek's post literally stopped the sale.

It doesn't break for the end user, it just doesn't render in IE 8 for administrators.

Oh, thanks for the clarification. I have to admit I didn't try it. I don't see any issue, then.

The target market for this sort of analytics solutions is going to have vanishingly small numbers of IE8 users.

More like zero lol.

Are you (dare I say it) trolling? :)

IE8 doesn't support some of the javascript functions/methods they provide you. Namely Array.prototype.slice.call

So no I'm not trolling, I'm being 100% honest.

As bdt101 mentioned here[1], the way they're using Array.prototype.slice.call is supported by IE8. It is not supported when trying to slice a NodeList, as a NodeList is not a JScript object.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5424874