> If you must support outdated versions of IE then your future is grim.

Hello from military industrial complex business world. A hundreds of billions of dollars market where exactly almost nobody uses latest firefox, chrome and quite a few use IE8.

What looks grim for you is a boon over here. Supporting IE8 puts money in the pocket, money in the pocket makes the future not so "grim" ;-) Saying you need latest Chrome or Firefox guarantees just getting laughed at and shown the door.

I hate IE compatibility too, but there's still a lot of people using them; ~5% use IE8, ~2 use IE7. What business is willing to give up 7% of their revenue?

This varies widely by industry. We sell software to insurance companies. 40% of our pageviews are IE8. Sure, we can choose to ignore those customers, but in our world that's a lot of money to leave on the table.

I'm not saying I think everyone should be building for IE8. I wish we could stop. But it's also not always just as easy as saying give up 5% of your potential users. The HN crowd is so often consumer focused and incredibly out of touch with the enterprise markets (this is not an argument against the parent comment, but an overall trend I notice on HN).

as a supporting piece of anec-data I worked for an education startup in the uk - and we had to support IE 6 (six) as upwards of 50% of our userbase of high schools had locked in contracts with suppliers like RIM (not blackberry) and could not upgrade without incurring costs - which meant it did not happen.

Depends on a few more things:

1) If it's actually 7% of your revenue as opposed to just global traffic stats.

2) If entrenched IE customers would actually stop using your product rather than just install another browser.

3) If the cost of maintaining shims, backwards compatibility and ultimately just falling behind the competition in both experience and features is less than that potential 7% market.

And to expand on your points, is there anyone that is an entrenched IE 7 or 8 user because they just love that browser. My guess would be not, and that instead they are just using that because it's the latest version of IE that they can get on their OS. Anecdotally, I've seen a number of large organizations that I work with allow installation of new third party browsers even though they stay at an old version of IE for compatibility reasons.

So my point is that of that 7% that are using older versions of IE, it's probably a much smaller number that would not be willing or able to use an alternate browser to run your web application if they find value in it.

I'll happily give up 7% of revenue if I spend more supporting that small subset's outdated tech than I make in profit off them...

Give up 7% of revenue to speed up development by 30%.

To clarify, I'm fully aware that there's business to be had related to legacy browsers. I'm not arguing against the business case. If you've got a significant customer base with this need, then you'll have to choose tools that let you deliver.

To rephrase, makers of new tools, as a rule, tend to be forward-looking. This is what I'd expect. As corollary to this, at some point it no longer makes sense to support legacy technology. This produces a tradeoff within the aforementioned business case: is it worth the product constraints, effectively an externally imposed technical debt, to support that part of your market? How will you fare versus your competitors going forward if you do, or do not, support the legacy tail?

As soon as it is impossible to browse the web with old ie, users will be forced to switch. If you support old ie, you are contributing to it continuing to hang around.

Consider that support for those browsers is quickly becoming a niche market, especially where new ventures are concerned.