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Comment by themoonbus | Hacker News Reader

The worse problem is IE8, which is the highest supported version on XP, and is a way bigger piece of crap than IE9... especially with XP's still high market share.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/weeks-...

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It's as if it was only yesterday that we saw Microsoft bragging about IE9 being arguably slightly ahead of the other browsers.

Ugh... yeah, I'd give my pinky finger to only have to worry about IE9 and up.

Windows XP is abandoned on April 8th. A large number of the Windows XP machines still in use are in China (nearly all pirated). The other ones can often be safely ignored for most businesses as they're not going to be customers anyway.

I'm not sure why you think that the non-Chinese XP machines won't be potential customers. In my experience, the largest remaining IE8 (and even IE6) holdouts are big enterprises and government organizations. Those organizations are also some of the richest potential customers out there.

For our product (enterprise task and workflow management), we see about 2% IE6/7 and about 5% IE8 in our customer base. Of those customers, most are planning to upgrade away from XP sometime in the next year or two.

That's why I said often. If you specifically deal with a US govt agency or large corporate customer with a poorly run IT department, you may very well still need those customers. But for most consumer businesses, Windows XP users aren't really going to be customers.

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