Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com