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Comment by tezzer | Hacker News Reader

I just got a report from NASA's systems admins saying they have approved IE9 for general rollout to the work force. The key paragraph:

"Beginning Tuesday, March 25, Internet Explorer (IE) 9 will be deployed to all ACES Windows computers. Not only does IE9 improve the security posture and comply with federal requirements, but it also has a new look and many new features. While there are later versions of IE available, the EUSO and HPES must do due diligence in analyzing each version from a security and compatibility perspective to ensure the protection of NASA systems. The ACES team will continue to evaluate and roll out the latest and safest versions possible."

So I had to laugh when the article stated, "Some of the browsers we supported at launch just can’t be considered modern by today’s standards. I’m talking about Internet Explorer 9 specifically."

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Our largest clients (both large banks over here) are still on XP+IE8 on their standard desktops. At least we are no refusing to support anything older (there are still pockets of IE7 at RBS it would seem) but I'd love to refuse to support IE8 too...

You should start refusing on April 8th, at which point Windows XP is unsupported and insecure.

I'm betting it will be just as safe/unsafe on April 8th as it is on April 7th. Yes people should have gotten off XP by now, but real life isn't always perfect.

There will not be a massive XP infection on April 8th, it will come at least a few weeks after that ;)

It might very well come on April 8th, since malware authors who find exploits in the period leading up to that date would wisely wait until right after the no-more-patching cliff to release their new 0days.

Considering how many Firefox flaws were saved up for the recent hackathon (since the rewards are 6x what Mozilla usually pays as a bounty), I'm betting on at least a couple critical ones being unleashed the day after, though it may take some time for them to be caught.

We couldn't. We don't sell off-the-shelf, we are selling on contract and that contract states that we will support their default build. We could argue the point at the next contract negotiations but if we simply refuse they will simply take their business elsewhere. Our concerns have been raised a number of times and will be raised again and minuted each time, so if there is a problem that comes down to their use of an outdated browser we won't (ligitimately) get it in the neck.

We are charging extra for any custom work to allow for testing and bug resolution specific to ancient combinations, and refusing to address superficial issues at all without a full change request and appropriate payment, but we simply can't refuse to aupport XP+IE8 without telling them to take their £20,000/month elsewhere.

We do have big new potential customers on the horizon, and they are more up-to-date in that respect. Maybe if these people don't upgrade soon and we do get huge new contracts, we'll be in a position to say "your choice, upgrade or go be a problem to our competitors" come the next contract round. I hope so.

Yeah, we just recently got our IE upgraded to 9 on our Army (MAMC) network. FF 24 ESR too... moving on up.

Unfortunately many networks on many of the bases are still using IE 7 and 8, so we have to support those some of the time (project dependent).

I was just pitching a client that was on IE 8. D'oh! Very hard to keep things working on older stuff. That said, it seems very surprising that overall usage of IE was so low. I would have thought it to be at least 20%.

Trello launched from day zero, in Sep 2011, without IE8 support. At that point, IE <= 8 was about 80% of the IE crowd[1]. FogCreek said that IE8 support was coming, but it never materialized, and they eventually just passed on.

So the truth is that Trello always stayed pretty much ahead of the IE usage curves, so that most people with IE willing to use it, simply couldn't.

I guess this is the reason why they don't have many IE users in the first place.

[1] according to W3Counters, which is the first I found with 2011 numbers readily available.

It’s true that Trello never supported IE8, but we never promised or intended to add IE8 support. We wanted to support the browsers of today and tomorrow, which was IE9 at launch.

I stand corrected then, you never even tried to get the IE crowd.

But my point that you're misreading numbers remains. You see low IE9 usage because you don't have IE users, because, in the previous years, up to 80% of them couldn't use your product.

And now you're using these numbers to back your decision that you don't need IE9. Guess what? You won't see IE adoption grow much over the next years as well.

IE users means enterprises. By dropping IE9 now, you're again running faster than them. That's perfectly fine and I'm actually jealous, I wish I could do the same. At the same time, I'm sure it has a measurable impact on the potential market of your Trello business class product.

This makes a lot of sense. If you don't ever support a browser, then there's no apology required when you remove support of it.

Active users at work: 38% IE7, 8% IE8, and 45% IE9

I still remember the backlash from when they were going to require IE10 for VS2013.

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