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Comment by oneeyedpigeon | Hacker News Reader

Which versions of Internet Explorer are supported on Windows beyond XP? Is it now 'officially' impossible to support IE6 users anymore?

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You are right. Here's wikipedia:

"It is the default browser shipped with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, and was also made available for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows Me, Windows 2000, and Windows Home Server (a derivative of Windows Server 2003). IE6 SP1 is the last version of Internet Explorer available for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows Me, and Windows 2000. Although Internet Explorer 6 was superseded by Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006, Microsoft still supports it in Windows XP SP3."

The IE6 compatibility issue should be mostly a thing of the past now, except for some corporate settings and china. But I feel IE8 will stay with us for a long time with a few annoying percentage points that can't always be ignored - and by now it's almost as bad as IE6 was 8 years ago. The only thing that makes the situation better than before is the much higher adoption of FF and Chrome, which at least keeps IE8 users at single digit rates for consumer websites.

Why would 8 be a problem? There is nothing supported that can't run higher and the situation that made IE6 end up being so entrenched, that MS sat on IE development for so long and IE6 was the only IE for many years, didn't happen with anything after that.

IE8 is a problem because many big enterprises still run it. I know of several big US corporations that, even though they run Windows 7 now, still deploy it with IE8 for compatibility with legacy applications.

Once you start dealing with big corporations, it's not as simple as "oh it's time to update".

Unless you're targeting enterprise customers, is that really much of a problem?

It's not just enterprise. For consumer websites the usage is going to hover around 3-5% (IE6,7,8 combined) for a long time - if you target less technically inclined people probably more. Tablets and Smartphones probably help more than Win7+ adoption in that area, but there's still going to be a significant amount of people using browsers on older computers.

> hover around 3-5% (IE6,7,8 combined)

I do not see the point of worrying about this. If enterprise (put forward as the major user of these) is the worry then you might have to care. If it's random users that just don't feel like running Windows Update, well, these people aren't going to be spending much money anyway.

Worrying about [insert version of IE here] hanging around forever seems to be nothing but complaining for the sake of complaining now that IE6 is completely out of the picture.

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