Let's discuss: Will IE8 follow IE6 footsteps?

1 pointaudriusarj2 comments

Microsoft left out XP users from IE9. 50% of population use XP. No ways to upgrade to better browser. What are your thoughts and development plans?

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I'm not worried about it. Browsers are more fragmented that they've ever been. I'm going to leave the compatibility stuff to library writers like socket.io, persistance.js, etc. And when those aren't available or are too complicated, I'm just going to write to the most modern browsers and concede a certain segment of web users (the least valuable, in my opinion), won't be able to use my app.

At least IE6 was good in its day. IE8 has always sucked so it's probably going to be as much of a burden even if the time that XP lingers on is less than the time that IE6 stagnated after they disbanded the development team.

It doesn't help that browser innovation elsewhere is accelerating. IE8 will still be around and competing with Firefox 10 and Chrome 27.

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