On 2/19/2013 10:22 AM, Michael Schofield wrote:
> Now that Google, jQuery, and others will soon drop support for IE8 -
> its time to politely join-in and make luddite patrons aware. IMHO,
> anyway.

I would like a cite for this. I think you are mis-informed. It is a 
misconception that JQuery is dropping support for IE8 anytime soon. And 
I'm not sure what you mean about 'Google' dropping support for IE8.

[The mis-conception comes from the fact that JQuery 1.9 will not support 
IE <9, HOWEVER, JQuery 1.8 will be supported indefinitely as 
feature-complete-compatible with JQuery 1.9, and supporting IE <9. 
JQuery 1.9 is just an alternate smaller JQuery without IE 8 support, 
yeah, but JQuery 1.8 has no EOL and will be supported indefinitey 
feature-complete with 1.9].

Anyway, I think it's clear that the web developer with our level of 
resources can not afford to support every browser that may possibly exist.

We have to decide on our list of browsers we will actually spend time 
ensuring work with our code.  (You can also, like JQuery-mobile, have a 
list that's supported as 'first class', and another list that is 
supported with graceful degredation -- and then others which you don't 
look at at all, and may fail miserably/unusably).

That decision is generally based on a combination of popularity of 
browsers among your users as well as difficulty (expense) to support.

If you can politically get away with no longer supporting IE8 even 
though it's popular among your users, I guess that could be legit. It 
depends on your 'business needs', right?

Once you've decided to stop supporting a browser, especially one that 
may be popular anyway, a secondary question is whether to let it just 
silently potentially fail (you generally aren't spending time analyzing 
whether it will in fact fail, work as intended, or degrade gracefully -- 
that's part of the point), or actually sniff user agents and give the 
user some sort of warning that your site may not work with your browser.

If you are going to give a warning, I'd recommend it be a relatively 
unobtrusive warning that still lets them proceed to use your site anyway 
if they want to ignore your warning, rather than one that locks them out.