Best I can tell IE8 is somewhere around 6% in the US (these numbers are rough to find because most of the places that collect statistically significant numbers charge for the info). On my site (which centers around a first-world disposable-income-heavy hobby) IE8 is basically non-existent. Your mileage may vary.
Anyone not ensuring their site works on IE is leaving money and customers on the table. Note that it doesn't have to look exactly the same, but it should still work and allow customers to learn, buy, sign in, subscribe, etc.
We're talking about dropping support for a browser that is mostly used on a thirteen year old operating system that even Microsoft has dropped support for.
My site is unlikely to ever have a significant number of IE8 users. It revolves around a nerdy hobby that people easily spend $500/year on, often in big chunks. They aren't letting their tech get that out of date.
I fully admit that this isn't every market, but you absolutely CAN make decisions about your specific market and decide that IE8 just simply is not and never will be worth it.
On the other hand, there are certain markets that will probably have to worry about IE8 for ten more years.
I wonder what that's doing to the maintainability of your code base. I'm sure the overall cost is higher than just the pay of a single developer ruining your architecture. Supporting IE6 is more than just about fixing bugs.
Unfortunately my home nation (though very small) is also on something like 20% WinXP (thus limited to IE8). It's ridiculous, but as long as clients are willing to pay us to support IE8, then that's what we'll do, much as we hate it. In my country it hopefully won't be long before it becomes prohobitively expensive to support IE8, so there's that... :)
Chrome and Firefox are still supported on XP. Surely they could switch browsers if forced?
http://chrome.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/extending-chrome-suppor... http://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-to-support-firefox-on-win...
In the UK, analogue terrestrial television was eventually turned off, and replaced by digital, following a lengthy publicity campaign.
I would guess there are very few people staring at blank TV screens and wondering what to do now. My point is, you need to give people a push sometimes.
Anti-virus companies use an IE8 user agent string sometimes for finding dangerous sites. Other bots and crawlers still use the IE8 string, although it seems like many are switching to Chrome.
I've never been able to find a resource about this, but is there any data available for the breakdown of bots/crawlers and their effect on browser usage statistics?
One reason I ask is that using the web with IE8 is pretty miserable and a lot of sites are flat out broken. I know there is an aspect of corporate networks on it, but 20% just seems really high if you realize that 20% or more of the web is broken for IE8 users.
Second, IE8 is still very popular browser with 20% market share. You don't want to lock out 1 in every 5 of your users.
Third, a major point of using frameworks is not having to worry about browsers. This is why making frameworks are hard.
Fourth, people who are stuck with IE8 or below are typically not by their choice.