1) Because they are Enterprises.

2) Because nobody wants to support those browsers.

If you think it's a declining market that'll be dead in 18 months, we have contracts to support IE 6 until 2019, not to mention 7 and 8.

I can't remember how high it was, but let's say it was around 10%. We were told that we had to support all the way down to IE6. To do so, we raised our prices, almost constantly during that project, and they happily paid it. At that level, an agency can change thousands for legacy browser support, and the client will happily pay, because in their mind that 10% will spend far more money than what we can charge.

With that in mind, that's how I view browser specifications today. For clients with an existing website, I check what percentage of their users use legacy browsers, and work out with them whether the cost of supporting these users against the potential benefit. A lot of developers and agencies simply won't do this because they either can't or won't find a solution for legacy browsers.

There's a ton of money there, but you need to build the right organization. Some companies will find it easier to sell to smaller businesses.

Once your competitions builds a better mousetrap, sends in their sales team then explains that all your customers need to do is install Chrome, it might get a little ugly.

Fully supporting IE 6 doesn't constrain you at all with the modern browsers, we take full advantage of the recent stuff. We basically have 2 codebases wrapped up behind a single API.

No, since these are his customers exactly because they don't want to install Chrome.

Since the <font> element has been long deprecated, the barcodes as well as a few other elements rendered differently. This alarmed a few of my bosses who were eager to understand what could be done to bring the barcodes back. After showing them IE10's dev tools and the browser mode, the problem has been temporarily fixed.

But many people I spoke with in the office were of the opinion that IE8 was all around better than IE10, and for their use case, they're not wrong. The legacy software everyone here uses to generate reports is outdated, but it still serves its purpose fine. Web standards and innovative technologies are not relevant to them on a personal level to justify the inconvenience of the update. So yes, my coworkers prefer IE8 to other browsers, but only because they depend on it.

The software we use to generate reports, by the way, could easily be changed to meet modern web standards. So, their opinion is further arbitrated if the software would just be tweaked to work with newer browsers.

[1] http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-...

In fact, it clearly shows about 35% of IE users still cling onto older versions during the weekends.

How can it be the case that nobody uses old IE by choice, if at least one person does?

But anecdotes are pretty useless against hyperbole. About the best you can accomplish by going that route is to devolve the conversation into a quagmire of "dueling anecdotes" sophistry.

Especially when articles about old versions of IE don't render in the browser.

"Error: 'd3' is undefined"

IE8 came out in 2009. 4.5 years is not that long in enterprise terms.

[derp. updated the numbers because I was being stupid, but the point still stands]

Like using LM Hashes for "backwards compatibility" or older, more easily exploitable browsers.

See, browsers have become so important that they now support the OS, not the other way around.

I recognize that the latest version of IE finally has auto-update. It taking Microsoft this long to do what Firefox and Chrome have been doing for years doesn't do anything more than certify that Microsoft Actively makes my job 50% more difficult on a daily basis.

IE really needs silent auto-update, and to actually release more often...

They want it, but your typical large enterprise foces IE down their throats, courtesy of 20+ years of rape by the legions of IT guys who, through the cognitive dissonance inducing Microsoft certification/training/tools process now think that everything Microsoft is magic.

If you are reading this, and 3 years ago you were telling everyone at work how amazing Silverlight was going to be, you are part of the problem. If you were talking about how great Sharepoint was going to be, you are part of the problem.

FYI: Most people working in the Pentagon are forced to use IE8. Just in case anyone here had any illusions about how deep Microsofts' shitty certificate-holding fanboy culture has penetrated our government.

I can't speak for every company, but in my experience there's much more to it than that.

A large part of the problem is that many of the tools leveraged by Enterprises (which are purchased from vendors) to develop web applications are extremely brittle and sensitive to the user's browser. When you talk about pushing a new version of IE, every web tool in the company (easily dozens) needs to be examined to determine the impact and cost related to making sure it works with the new version. This often means pushing new versions of these vendor packages as well, and the costs associated with that planning (think of the management effort required) and implementation.

In many Enterprises, this is infrastructure overhead and is largely avoided (it's a huge headache/cost) until absolutely necessary. "Absolutely necessary" means when the vendor (MSoft) stops supporting that browser version. Which doesn't happen until it is well past obsolete.

Of course, management gets many of these concepts from those Microsoft Certified developers, but that's not the whole story.

And by then the Windows version will have ended support too.

And in a different DoD office a few miles away, IE7. :(

But this was a government-contracted non-profit and it couldn't just write them off as customers. So the organization decided it would be cheaper to help these customers upgrade their legacy operating system, browser and enterprise apps then to continue to try and remain reasonably compliant with their browser.

For example, my blog is based in the UK but gets a substantial proportion of visits from the USA - which itself has multiple timezones.

There are a few other patterns we've spotted about IE users:

They're older - we can deduce this from the the fact that many include their year of birth in their email address.

They're less tech savvy, we see people typing in in all caps, using the search as it wasn't intended - and we've actually had a few get in touch via the feedback form asking for tech support.

Also the conversion rate from visitor to sign up user is consistently 3x that of Chrome.

A few major lawsuits for major $$$ might solve that problem.

And because the browsers aren't the more recent versions with more recent bug fixes, it may actually increase vulnerabilities, making things LESS secure.

It's also funny reading how Chrome had a 1.9% share at that time, and how I found it amazing :)

[1] http://hancic.info/ie6-is-dead-over-the-weekend

I went in to open a business account the other day, they wanted to take a look at the business website, and it looked like complete crap. Took a look and it was IE7. It was like stepping into a time machine...

If it was just a case of sites looking "less beautiful" in IE, that would be fine too, except that IE often breaks websites by not supporting certain CSS properties or Javascript functions.

The amount of work that goes into IE-proofing websites (which could've gone into more productive things) is huge. It's not just "hipsterism", a lot of these people are angry for a reason.