asked on

Time to drop IE8

With IE11 making its way to W7 in the next few months.
Is it time to drop all support for <IE9
My own figures are
IE8 - 0.6%
IE7 - 1.2%
Of those percentages - Googlebot is responsible for 99% of them.
Of the XP users, the vast majority are using Chrome and a small percentage using FF and the odd few IE8.

I already barely support anything below IE9, except where it requires very little effort on my part. But now I'm thinking I should just drop support completely, upgrade to jQuery 2.x and many other things. Obviously my visitors are not using them.
But as developers are we maintaining this stranglehold that IE has by not abandoning them?
What kind of figures are other people seeing.

p.s. this is an ecommerce site and accommodation reservation site (and some smaller not busy sites), so there is no technical bias to my visitors other than they shop online

Edit.
I see Google are dropping IE8 support in GA at the end of the year.

SOLUTION

Dave Baldwin

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Gary

ASKER

My figures are from Statcounter
Of those Google results, I have a query
Here's an example

24 Sep 07:24:33 IE 8.0
WinXP
1024x768 United States Flag Mountain View,
California,
United States Google (66.249.83.61) [Label IP Address]
 <url>
 www.google.de —  <url>#4

Open in new window

These are all links from AdWords. The search term is my url and keywords from my campaigns.
Why is Google presenting itself as XP and IE8 - does anyone else see this?

SOLUTION

Kwoof

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Gary

ASKER

Have I discovered a glitch in Statcounters figures, I double checked my paid visitors for yesterday on Statcounter against my recorded clicks in Adwords.
They match exactly when I take away the above type clicks.
Does this mean Statcounter are over representing IE7/8 and XP/Vista
I just opened a thread over there asking for an explanation.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Scott Fell

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Kwoof

Don't forget, since this is an ecommerce site, you need to also include statistics of sales volume tied to browser to help determine the possible sales impact of dropping support for a browser.

SOLUTION

COBOLdinosaur

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Gary

ASKER

Sorry forgot about this.
I decided to just go CSS3/HTML5 and throw in the shim on one site and it seems to work fine even if it looks a bit pig ugly but it is still usable. I thought some things might not work but they all seem to be fine.

COBOLdinosaur

Yeah old IE looks funny when I look at my site because I use a lot of rounded corners an transitions. both of which old junk does not support but renders okay. I have a few pages that will not render acceptable because of the advanced CSS so for those I just put up a notice telling the user they need to upgrade.

Cd&