At which point do you decide to stop supporting older browsers?

Question

I would like to start a community discussion. As per my question, when do you decide to stop supporting older browsers?

I've nearly completed the development of a large personal application. It uses a lot of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. If I were to support older browsers, I would estimate that it would increase my front end work load by at least 50%. And to be frank, I don't want to support the older browsers. From a business point of view, one could argue that if I don't, I could lose revenue. I disagree. I feel that the customers who use older browsers wouldn't be the customers I would want anyway - they would be the ones giving me more work as I'd have to fix compatibility problems in my application to work with their old browser or have to continually tell them to upgrade their browser. If the web is to move on, then people need to stop supporting the older browsers, however, I do see that the tide is slowly starting to turn towards this.

Recently, IE6 was pronounced dead. When can we safely say that IE7 and IE8 or indeed Firefox 3 can longer be considered as 'important' enough to support?

Furthermore, I hear a lot of people say on this site "make sure it degrades gracefully so it'll still work with browsers that don't have JavaScript support"? What kind of browsers now don't have JavaScript support? Mostly old phones and if these old phones don't support JavaScript then I highly doubt that they will parse the HTML correctly either. I also have a Sencha touch mobile version of my application. Am I going to make a WAP version of it to support older phones? No. It's a rich web app. That's how it has designed to be and that's how I intend for it to stay.

I rather like Apple's approach: If you upgrade your OS, don't expect your apps from the previous of the OS to work with the new one. Yes, it can be a frustration, but it means there is less of a mess overrall and people are forced to upgrade to move along with the times.

It works the same way for new web apps, if I want to keep them clean, quick and efficient, I need to stop hacking the code to support legacy software and if users don't like it, they can move on from my site or join the rest of us and upgrade their browser and have a better web experience.

I don't want this to come across as arrogant, but I am genuinely interested in your opinions when you consider enough is enough and only support recent browsers.

Answer 1

For me, I have always assessed the users who would be using it. I think in the end, it is impractical to support every single browser and its version under the sun.

As a baseline, I always ensure that the application works fine in IE8 and the latest version of Firefox. IE8 is pretty decent, so there usually isn't much work required to get it working. As most versions of Firefox and Chrome tend to get auto updated, I just test in Firefox Latest, Firefox 3.Latest and the latest version of chrome.

For example, if I am designing an application to be used by tech-heads, I wouldn't really care much about IE7 and below, or old versions of Firefox and Chrome.

However, if I am designing something that will be used internally and there are certain browser requirements, then I will make sure that the app works perfectly in those browsers (i.e. the dreaded IE6 and IE7).

As IE8 is the "final" version on Windows XP, I think it would be quite beneficial to ensure that things work decently in IE8 at least.

Also, since Facebook and GMail has dropped support for IE7 and below and older versions of other browsers, I think it's safe to say that we can ignore those versions too.

As for javascript, I think it is impractical to build something that works exactly the same without javascript. I think it is a good idea to gracefully degrade, so that certain things might not be avaliable for the user, but they can still use the app to a certain extent.

However, in certain cases, the whole app would not be able to work without javascript (or a non-javascript experience would be next to useless), then telling the user to enable javascript is probably a good idea. This is implemented in apps like Facebook and Google Docs. See this excellent blog post for some debate.

So, in summary:

• Develop for "modern browsers", IE8+, FF3.latest and the latest FF, latest Chrome and Opera.
• Support other browsers if the development/client requirements exist.
• Look at what the big boys (facebook and gmail) are doing in terms of browser support. If they can afford to drop support for browser x and we are developing an app targetted towards general consumers, then we can afford to drop support for browser x too.

Answer 2

I agree with you on the most part that it is a pain to support older browsers and I think that creating web applications that are supported on older browsers such as IE6 and IE7 should be stopped because it is our duty as developer's to help the web advance even further.Furthermore Google has dropped support for every IE browser under IE8 and these in my agenda means that the browser is as good as dead and I can safely stop to create websites for it.

IE8 is a decent browser and is still very widely used even if it's usage is being dropped at an increasing rate : browser usage statistics ; I still think that you should develop for it at least a year from now when hopefully it's usage will be to small to matter

Firefox ,Safari,Chrome and Opera have auto updates witch popup to the user every time a new version is released so most of the times I don't bother checking for older versions how my websites work.

But about the graceful degradation of your websites I still think you should try as much as possible to make your websites work even if you have Javascript disabled because not all users have old browsers that don't support Javascript but there are those who keep it turned off for various reasons