IE8 is holding the rest of us back. Reality is that most usage of IE8 comes from corporate users who are stuck on such IE8. We can't keep supporting legacy browsers forever. The solution that has been working is to warn the user that their browser is not officially supported, and that things will break.

One of the banks that I consult with allow users to install the corporately limited version of Chrome, it's sometimes 10 or more versions behind latest stable, but it's better than IE8.

Bootstrap, Font-Awesome, jQuery are dropping IEx because it's a burden to maintain that for a small subset of users. We should all do the same.

According to statcounter (which I'm not claiming is accurate, just the only up-to-date source I could find) as of August 2015 IE8 had a market share of 2.32%. You have to be really unlucky with your audience/service if you really need to support IE8.

Microsoft themselves aren't going to be supporting IE8 anymore after January. Let it go.