This explains it pretty well. I always have to argue with other developers to not break IE8. The comeback is always that it represents less than 1% of our sales

This explains it pretty well. I always have to argue with other developers to not break IE8. The comeback is always that it represents less than 1% of our sales, I argue that the 1% of sales is still more than their salaries. As much as I'd love to stop keeping track of IE8 bugs, for a lot of sites this isn't possible. And, IMHO, this cavalier attitude is what causes many websites now to work "best" (read: only) in Chrome. It's true that a lot of sites (I'm thinking Webapps) don't need jQuery at all, and a lot of sites can get away with just using Sizzle, but 28kB is a small price to pay for the utility functions, cleaner AJAX API, event binding registry, etc. If you don't need them, by all means don't use it.