Statcounter[1] puts IE8 at ~10%, 12% for the US[2]. In some markets it's even lower[3]. This matches what I see from non-tech client websites. For anything related to software, IE as a whole is close to zero.

StatCounter tracks 3 million websites vs 40k for NetMarketShare.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/

[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combine...

[3] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combine...

10.29% worldwide according to: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201203...

Well one of the websites I'm working on is a fairly big one in germany and only about 4% of all visitors are using IE8 or below. Guess what! We now only support IE9+.

As best I can see on the site you linked, IE8 is 23.23%. That also disagrees significantly with this source: http://caniuse.com/usage_table.php where IE8 is 8.89%

You combined all aforementioned versions of IE together to yield that result: http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri... — even combined the market share is still in my opinion minuscule. The only browser with a substantial market share is IE 8 which according to the site has a market share of 23%, it's not even worth adding in those other percentages on-top to try and make it seem as though a lot of people still use those browsers.

31% is not justification enough to maintain legacy code in a library that has become a little bloated over the years because of the backwards compatibility with older browsers. If you want to support that 31%, use the 1.9 branch it's better than the alternative being no support whatsoever.

Edit: Why all of the down-votes, is my response offensive?

At my work (big data analytics for banks) we still have major customers using IE 6. We had to support 5.5 a few years back!

If you think about it, there is no real reason not to support old browsers, unless you are in online gaming, of course.

It is if your customer base are comprised of very few IE users.