I'm not intending to spread misinformation, and my comparison doesn't fall apart. My reason for even mentioning jquery is to illustrate the trend of influential stakeholders to move past support for old IE. Even my personal example doesn't involve dropping IE8 cold turkey, but that the wind is changing and I am interested in whether libraries should begin elbow nudging users for a better experience.

jQuery 1.9, if not given a kill date, is transitionary. The transition may take years. It's still a less than optimal experience for IE8. As auto-updating modern browsers broaden the gap, that experience will get worse. Even though jquery 1.9 will pick up the slack with javascript that other browsers can render with CSS, that doesn't mean it's a good experience. In fact, it will be a much slower one. 

My whole reason for sharing this thread is to question whether libraries should / could reduce support, how and when. 

On Feb 19, 2013, at 11:57 AM, "Jonathan Rochkind" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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.