Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

'Tech' is just too broad. If you're developing for KDE, then ignoring IE is very safe. If you're developing an addon for Visual Studio, then I'd probably not ignore IE.<p>For a generic 'tech' answer, I'd make sure the basic functionality works on IE, if ugly, and concentrate on Firefox and Chrome. (And if you do, Opera and Safari usually work without changes.)

I can tell you this is also true for historious, Chrome is at 46%, Firefox 27%, Safari 20% and IE 3%. Opera is 1.8%, but that's probably all me :(<p>We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate 2% of users. Hell, until very recently, our bookmarklet didn't work with IE (some XSS security settings? We never figured it out), but now it eschews the nice overlay it uses for other browsers and just bookmarks stuff. It's ugly, but it works, if our users want a better experience we recommend switching to a better browser.

Minecraft forum and wiki have 60m page views a month, 13% are Internet Explorer: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/m1WVO.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/m1WVO.jpg</a><p>I figured this might be interesting for some of you, although we're less technology...

We did this for our app, quplo, which is still in public beta as we figure out payment (like these guys describe). Our app involves some complicated javascript for a syntax highlighted, code completion-supporting HTML editor. Common sense indicated it wouldn't be a good idea to invest lots of time making things work in IE when a) Analytics showed less than 2% IE visitors, b) our target audience is web designers and developers who by and large don't use IE as their preferred browser, and c) the app is an enclosed environment where it's okay to say "use these browsers for the app".<p>So what to take away from this? If you're a startup, you should be prioritising, not obsessing. And high on the list is making money, not making a marginal number of users happy, handling politics, or premature optimisation (eg. writing code that works across all browsers).<p>One thing we messed up on: not creating a kick-ass UX on Mac from day 1. We fixed it in the meantime, but we're developers using Windows, and a significant portion of our userbase is designers on Macs. So Safari, Firefox, Chrome and especially things like Mac font rendering and UI controls needed to be lickety-split.

I made the decision to go ahead and use tech IE doesn't yet support in my app. I'll see how it works out in the end but currently I have users all over the world and none of them complained about this. In fact to be able to use some of the features they have to install a webgl enable browser which hasn't been an issue for my users either.<p>My users are scientist and researchers, but not all of them are completely computer literate. I hand hold them a little bit with the setup.

It depends on your target market. My start-up, <a href="http://www.MORExchange.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.MORExchange.com</a>, targets mortgage borrowers. Real estate agents are an important referral channel.<p>We're currently in an invite-only beta. But among our few hundred users, we're definitely seeing a skew towards Firefox / Webkit and away from IE. That said, the combined versions of IE are still 40% of our traffic. And I'm fairly convinced that IE share will grow as our product enters open registration.<p>That said, we decided to abandon IE 6 support during development. Metrics so far indicate that this was the right decision. We're only seeing 2% of our requests coming from that abomination.<p>We're also not doing anything special for IE 7 &#38; 8. They get the uglified version of the UI sans opacity, drop shadows, gradients, rounded corners, etc. I'm setting up analytics right now to see if browser version affects our conversion rate. I'm betting it doesn't.<p>Of course, we're not doing anything terribly unusual. We have no burning need for the canvas element, for example. So supporting IE 7 &#38; 8 hasn't been terrible for us. I'd imagine that's a significant limitation for other start-ups.<p>We're also a traditionally funded company. So we have the luxury of being a bit more ambitious with our initial product. If we were bootstrapping and attempting to find customer fit, I'd probably just target the latest Firefox / Webkit.

I think if you use a modern javascript framework (i.e jQuery), and test regularly, it shouldn't be that difficult / time costly anymore to support IE7 and IE8.<p>In my experience jQuery abstracts away most of the incompatibilities.

The inverse is sadly still true. 49.61% of our visitors used IE in the last 30 days. 10M+ uniques, predominantly users in schools.

15% IE on friendbinder (half are IE8). The user base is fairly early adoptor. Pretty much everything works in IE except some of the rounded corners.<p>If your site doesn't work in IE, then you will show fewer IE users as a result.

I'm reminded of statistics showing X website doesn't support mobile because only Y% of their traffic comes from mobile. Guess what? If the site doesn't work on a given browser, you're biasing you sample size. I think it was in Coupland's Microserfs that there was the story of corporate waiting until all the soda was gone to restock the fridge -- how can you know what people actually want if you articifically restrict their choices.<p>Now, the premise seems plausible, but you can't back up that premise with data that I know a priori is skewed to support that premise.

Some more anecdotal evidence, my company (not <i>mine</i>; <a href="http://getglue.com" rel="nofollow">http://getglue.com</a>) actually originally launched solely as a Firefox extension (primarily distributed through Firefox AMO).<p>This actually played some role in my decision in taking the job- this was still in 2008, when ignoring IE was essentially almost never an option. Better, was that the extension views were developed in CSS- so I was free to explore CSS3 much earlier in live projects.<p>More timely, even as a website we still have very little focus on supporting IE users.<p>IE makes up for &#60; 7% of our total visitors, and IE6 only 4% of <i>that</i>. More interestingly, a lot of our visitors now come through consumer markets like HBO and Fox. I think the numbers are surprisingly low for IE already; but considering our market is no longer a techie market (quite the opposite), the numbers are somewhat more interesting.<p>That all said, I think this speaks true to the title of the article. It's just a careful decision you need to make- but fortunately not one that is impossible to solve quickly, should you make the wrong one.

At least add chrome frame. So IE users have a valid option to use your site.

Here are some better places to get real stats on browser usage:<p><a href="http://marketshare.hitslink.com/" rel="nofollow">http://marketshare.hitslink.com/</a><p><a href="http://gs.statcounter.com/" rel="nofollow">http://gs.statcounter.com/</a><p><a href="http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/" rel="nofollow">http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/</a><p>Your own browser stats are skewed at this moment, I wouldn't base any important decisions on them.<p>One interesting tidbit from Statcounter:<p>In Europe FF usage has caught up to IE, they are both around 40%.<p>In North America IE has double the usage of FF, with IE at ~50%.

That's a ridiculous overgeneralization. You need metrics for your own site, you need to know the expectations of your users, you need to judge how much time and effort supporting IE will take for your app, etc.

If the majority of people used IE, would that be a good reason to forget about supporting other browsers?<p>I'd say it wouldn't; I reckon content produced for the web should always allow people the freedom to choose how they view it.<p>Not supporting IE6 is something I could maybe understand - but forgetting about IE7 and IE8, because of time constraints, is a maybe bit lazy.<p>It's not that difficult to use principles of progressive enhancement and a CSS resets script to iron out inconsistencies.

When launching a new version of our website earlier this year we ran the numbers for the previous six months and found that 10% of our sales were not only IE, but IE 6. We're a small manufacturer that sells direct to customers and that 10% more than covered the extra time developing and testing for IE6. There was nothing sexy about the task, but none of use were willing to walk away from 10% of our sales.

If your product is futuristic and really needs stuff IE doesn't support (say, advanced HTML5 stuff) - OK. But if you're just doing it out of laziness then it's a bit silly. All the major CSS and JS frameworks pretty much eliminate the cost of supporting IE. These days the cost of supporting IE7/IE8 for me in a standard web site is fairly negligible. IE6 is another matter.

It all depends on your market. You can't ignore IE if your customers are on locked down, corporate workstations with guerrilla IT departments dictating IE only. Know your market, then decide accordingly.

I haven't found supporting IE7/8 to be difficult at all. I suppose I'm quite conservative about using the new functionality supported in webkit or firefox, however.

I hate working on IE, everytime I have to work a lot on CSS for IE. I wasted a lot of time on it. Should be considered illegal.

Once again, <i>the customer is always right</i>. Jusk ask them to telnet to port 80. Geez...

The sample of visits is probably too small and misleading. Developers (e.g. you and guys on the team developing the product) tend to use FireFox and now, Chrome, whereas most users will use the stock browser they have by default - IE.<p>I am running a company in a similar sector (tech related util software), and IE visits are more than 60%. Not to mention, that most corporate users have as a rigid requirement and you are effectively killing a lot of revenue potential.<p>So no - my advice is do not do it, support IE.