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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

These people might be using Microsoft software, but it would be a stretch to call them Microsoft customers. When was the last time they actually coughed up any cash? Besides, this is a bed Microsoft made, so they need to lie in it. The longer people stay with XP / IE 6-8, the worse the Internet gets for everyone. M$ is the only company that can do anything about it, and it's in their best interest to, so they just need to quit dilly-dallying and just do it already.

And is 10%+ of the Windows install base really XP???

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No, I mean they are my customers! Right now, today, I have 10%+ users on IE6 through IE8. If I can afford to dedicate the resources to support them, I will. I don't believe in punishing users and I certainly don't believe in turning people away if I don't have to.

I'm not sure about XP specifically, but I get way more than 10% of my traffic from IE6-8. IE8 alone is over 10% on some of my business news sites. Don't forget IE8 shipped with Windows 7.

I'd be curious to know what that IE6 support involves nowadays.

There's a difference between having certain simpler layouts (although that probably affects conversion too), and IE6 actually messing up a purchase flow on an e-commerce site.

I actually dropped support for IE6 already, and IE7 is only "best effort" and is currently pretty wonky since our last redesign. We don't release updates that don't work in IE8, though. Too many users. Luckily for us it's mostly just display issues and I have no problem removing nonessential features or sections that are too hard to make work.

But if it's breaking the flow of your site, it might well be more trouble than it's worth.

It's sounds like you are doing what everyone else is. If the cost of support < cost of retaining those users than you fix it. You've realized IE6 is not worth it at this point and sounds like IE7 is getting to that point. For some people supporting anything <IE9 doesn't make any sense. I'm curious about IE8 users though. It seems that after IE7 it would be a much faster life cycle. Doesn't IE9 auto update? So our last hope is to get IE8 user to upgrade 1 time and then we're good?

I work with some enterprise customers and they seem to be mostly IE8 or IE9. We have one dreadful customer who still wants IE6 support but we've officially dropped IE6 & IE7 support. We still do direct hacks as part of consulting for that customer.

Sure, blindly supporting everything regardless of cost is just as foolish as intentionally breaking support to punish old IE users (IMHO).

A disproportionate number of our most important users are running IE8. I don't know if it's because they're still on XP (and thus can't upgrade past 8) or some other reason.

I'm not an expert, but I think it's so much that IE9 auto-updates as Win7+ does a much better job of pushing updates that include new browsers.

Unfortunately IE10 is the first browser to start auto updating silently by default.

I don't have numbers, but I'd be willing to guess that a fair number of IE6, 7, and 8 users were on corporate PCs which prohibited installations of newer versions of IE or other browsers. Microsoft can't do anything about those people! They have been try to end support for Windows XP and IE 6 for years, and newer versions of IE auto-update unless the user specifically tells the OS not to.

Actually Windows XP is 29% (http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/end-windows-xp-ha...) though it is steadily dropping.

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