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I've been rumaging over this same thought myself and I think there's a real key point here that is sort of distinguished between in the article, mainly it boils

I've been rumaging over this same thought myself and I think there's a real key point here that is sort of distinguished between in the article, mainly it boils down to just knowing your audience, but on a broader level I think its this: are you developing a web app or a website? For me, if I'm building an app I've also gotten to the point where I just ignore IE completely, mainly for reasons stated in the article (writing tons of work arounds that convolute the codebase, absolute lack of support for MANY features, etc). Also I think in most cases( it does depend) for most apps and their audience, very few are going to be using IE, so I don't really care about losing that 1% of my target group, especially if it helps me build a better app. For websites, sadly, the story is in most cases different and the majority of users will come from some version of IE. (Although, personally I've notice this changing a lot in the last year for my sites, we've been getting huge spikes in mobile - which yes, means no IE, so I think unless microsoft does something to take over mobile in 5 years devs aren't gonna have to worry about it.

bpatrianakos 14y ago
"devs aren't gonna have to worry about it" Yeah, out of context but I think this is telling. I know a lot of devs who ignore one browser or another or ignore mile or ignore desktop or only do responsive design as opposed to building out a mobile only site and vice versa. In most cases they do some mental gymnastics to convince themselves they don't need to worry about a certain segment of the market. I think is is dangerous in that it can cost you a lot of money. Many times these decisions are made because they don't want to pay for supporting X or don't want to learn how. Then they justify it by saying that market segment X is too small to support. Instead of being based on reality it instead is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Market segment X doesn't use site Y not because they're so small but simply because X is not supported. Imagine HN launched today. Today is HN's first day and for some reason PG said we won't support IE because HNers are all using "better" "modern" browsers. Then he checks the logs and sees a very small portion of IE users that steadily shrinks. Is the portion small because Hackers who use IE are few and far between? Maybe. Or maybe it's because people who visited HN on IE couldn't access the site and so they didn't spread word to their friends who may also use IE and of course they never return because the site never worked for them to begin with and so the number of IE users remains small enough to be ignored. But in reality we know that there are definitely enough HN users on IE to justify supporting it. I know because I see my own logs from HN referrals from posts I've made in the past or people reading my profile. The percentage is lower than other browsers but definitely more than a trickle and surely not low enough to justify not supporting IE if I ever had to make that decision. My whole point is that I think it's dangerous to make assumptions about your audience because they often become self-fufilling prophecies. You can't say a certain platform isn't worth supporting until you have data to show it and you can't get that data (at least not accurate data) unless you support the platform in question to begin with. I do agree with you about Windows phone though. At this point, at least in the mobile space, I think companies would be smart to make their mobile browsers compatible with what's out there now rather than releasing a mobile browser and expecting developers to cater to it. I wonder if the iPhone would've taken off like it did had they decided to release a very stripped down version of Safari and expect devs to modify their sites to support it.

bpatrianakos 14y ago

"devs aren't gonna have to worry about it" Yeah, out of context but I think this is telling. I know a lot of devs who ignore one browser or another or ignore mile or ignore desktop or only do responsive design as opposed to building out a mobile only site and vice versa. In most cases they do some mental gymnastics to convince themselves they don't need to worry about a certain segment of the market. I think is is dangerous in that it can cost you a lot of money. Many times these decisions are made because they don't want to pay for supporting X or don't want to learn how. Then they justify it by saying that market segment X is too small to support. Instead of being based on reality it instead is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Market segment X doesn't use site Y not because they're so small but simply because X is not supported. Imagine HN launched today. Today is HN's first day and for some reason PG said we won't support IE because HNers are all using "better" "modern" browsers. Then he checks the logs and sees a very small portion of IE users that steadily shrinks. Is the portion small because Hackers who use IE are few and far between? Maybe. Or maybe it's because people who visited HN on IE couldn't access the site and so they didn't spread word to their friends who may also use IE and of course they never return because the site never worked for them to begin with and so the number of IE users remains small enough to be ignored. But in reality we know that there are definitely enough HN users on IE to justify supporting it. I know because I see my own logs from HN referrals from posts I've made in the past or people reading my profile. The percentage is lower than other browsers but definitely more than a trickle and surely not low enough to justify not supporting IE if I ever had to make that decision. My whole point is that I think it's dangerous to make assumptions about your audience because they often become self-fufilling prophecies. You can't say a certain platform isn't worth supporting until you have data to show it and you can't get that data (at least not accurate data) unless you support the platform in question to begin with. I do agree with you about Windows phone though. At this point, at least in the mobile space, I think companies would be smart to make their mobile browsers compatible with what's out there now rather than releasing a mobile browser and expecting developers to cater to it. I wonder if the iPhone would've taken off like it did had they decided to release a very stripped down version of Safari and expect devs to modify their sites to support it.