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Comment by mbell | Hacker News Reader

IE8 is a complete mess in comparison to modern browsers. To support IE8 you often have to go through a lot of extra work after the site works in modern browsers to get it functional even if your not doing something particularly complex. At the very least its often a whole bunch of different CSS / replacing CSS with images to get the rendering to look decent. In addition a lot of 'Show HN' posts tend to use 'cool new tech' that just doesn't work at all in IE8. To get it functional you often have to implement an entirely different approach just for IE8. Most 'Show HN' links are MVP products, the devs just decided to release quick instead of spending a few extra weeks dealing with IE8's shenanigans.

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IE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users.

If you have an analytics software that doesn't work in IE8. You lost analytics for 20-30% of your users.

And since array.prototype.slice.call is not supported in IE8, this analytics software is about 80-70% useful. And maybe even less if you have a large IE clientele.

Seems strange to me that one would limit themselves that much.

>IE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users.

Perhaps in some markets.

For one of the sites I write for, it's less than 5% over a large sample.

> IE8 is perfectly fine,

No, its really not, its a huge pain in the ass to support unless you handcuff yourself to its limitations.

> and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users.

Those numbers are wildly skewed by market segment. IE8 is a relic that mostly only exists on corporate controlled laptops at this point. If they aren't your target user, you can pretty much ignore them. None of the sites I work on see over 5% IE8 usage.

No, it's not perfectly fine. It's terrible and takes a good amount of extra work to get working for any mildly complex website.

Around here IE8 is at < 7% market share; if your product is slightly related to tech that's more like 0%.

I spend more time fixing issues in IE10, Opera, and the WebKit family then I do fixing IE8.

Sure it doesn't support a lot of HTML5/CSS3. But if you build a site using 100% HTML5/CSS3 then why do you even care what it looks like in anything but WebKit. Why spend 15 hours getting it to work in IE8. Let IE8 look like IE8, and the rest look like the rest. That's how it's suppose to be done.

IE8 is old, if you want to support it. You use older technologies. That's the point. If you want to use the newest and greatest you lose old support.

But to call it terrible is wrong, it is/was a solid browser.

That's the point. IE8 is old, and not 'perfectly fine' if you're creating a web-based product and not just looking for rounded corners. It was great after living with IE6, but we moved on. Even Google has dropped support for IE8 in most apps.

I don't understand the comment about Array.prototype.slice.call. I only see them using it to convert arguments to an array which works fine in IE8.

I thank God everyday for our outstandingly small IE population

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