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Comment by nbashaw | Hacker News Reader

I seriously doubt IE6 support can be the difference between "wildly profitable and failing" for any business. Can you name one example of a failing company that started supporting IE6 and then became wildly profitable?

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Maybe not in 2011. But a couple years ago, it wasn't unusual to see 50% IE6 traffic on corporate-oriented apps.

And, yes, I can give a few examples were the webdevs ignored legacy browser support and got burned.

I'm genuinely curious to hear which web developers ignored legacy browser support and got burned. Please divulge.

Sure. The example I was thinking of in particular was an internal project from about 5 years ago where their CSS2 layout completely blew up on IE6. However rather than get down-n-dirty to fix it, they demanded additional budget for a rewrite using tables.

But just last week, another subcontractor apparently didn't realize that our government client was stuck on Flash v9 and spent the next two weeks trying to sort it out.

And it hasn't happened in a few months, but we used to get occasional complaints from clients stuck on Safari v4.

Obviously it would be the other way around, discontinuing IE6 support might lead to falling. Think of random niche industries with ancient old hardware and no-one who cares about software updates.

Fair enough, but I still don't think a business that is wildly successful would fail by discontinuing IE6 support -- even in a "random niche industry" where IE6 users make up more than 2% of their customer base. In fact, I doubt any of those businesses are currently wild successes. But I guess that all depends on how you define success.

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