Ask HN: Do you support IE8?

4 points by skwosh ↗ HN

15 comments

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In few projects (when we know users from old office computers will use it), but mostly no, IE 9 is the minimum.
Make sure things are usable but never bother making them look totally right. IE9 is the minimum for that
No, IE9 is the minimum we support at work.
IE9 here. We deal with stale large corporates, and more than half of our clients now run IE10 as standard, though IE9 still has a meaningful share. We dropped IE8 support for all new releases in Jan this year.
All versions IE in our project are only <4%. For example IE11 is used about 3,8%. So we don't support IE8-10.
I'd be interested to know if people are serving apps or app-like functionality, or if they're serving mostly text and images.

(Because it's weird to me how many sites serving mostly text and images fail so hard)

Yes, kinda.

It still makes us around € 30K per month, and it makes sense, for now.

Yep, and it's about as painful as you might expect.

Unfortunately we have a number of clients using our product (particularly government) which still expect it to be supported :(

Just wrapped a project with IE7, yes, SEVEN, support.
IE9+. Anything under, I tell my clients sorry cannot guarantee.
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I define a Modern Browser as: any browser with the ability to self-update to the latest version. These are the browsers most commonly used, and when a security vulnerability comes out they are on top of things. These all enjoy good HTML and CSS support, so I'm able to build what I need in a way that supports them all equally. If you come to me with a bug in a modern browser that's my bad - they should all be supported.

The second group of browsers are called Legacy Browsers: any browser which is isolated with no automatic upgrade path. This includes IE 8, 7, 6 as well as any legacy version of any other browser that didn't stay on the latest version. If you don't ask/pay for legacy support then I will design it using modern best practices and it will likely work well down to IE9.

For legacy support, I will support whatever browsers you wish at the normal hourly rate. If IE6 support is dear to you, and worth the cost I will happily dust off the ten-year-old techniques and give you the support you desire.

Keep in mind that IE8 doesn't include support for CSS @media queries, so most forms of responsive page layout will be impossible without the use of a polyfill! I think due to this, many sites that think they support IE8 don't actually render very well.

Project I am working on now is made only with Chrome/Firefox/Safari in mind, but the audience is mostly 20-25year old hipstery people IE share is less than 5% so we decided to not bother with support for them and just show a banner suggesting modern browser. But it's unusual to not support IE at all, usually I support 9+ if you want lower that will be extra fee.