In 2012 we had a very close look at our numbers. How many users were visiting our platform via the IE6 browser? Time and time again I went to the responsible Product guy until we finally hit the magic mark of 1%. 1% of our users performed an upsell via the IE6 browser. That was the point when we stopped supporting IE6. No more hacks were built for this old browser, meaning that developers and testers could spend their time on better software instead of looking for workarounds for the browser’s flaws.
In 2013 we also stopped supporting IE7.
No support for IE8 on XING
Honestly? Every front-end guy here at XING has been keen to ditch IE8 for quite some time now. If you asking a front-end guy, he’ll tell you to get rid of IE8 as soon as possible. Using jQuery you can’t update to the newest version because the jQuery guys dropped their support for IE8 as of version 2.
There are other reasons to stop supporting this old Internet Explorer version. One is security. Over a year ago Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP. The guys in Redmond never tired of telling people that this OS is insecure. Internet Explorer 8 was the last available browser version from Microsoft that ran on this OS. The press was full of news about security flaws with comments like “We’re talking about a pretty insecure piece of software”, “It would be in everyone’s own interest to use a more secure browser” and “Microsoft will stop fixing security flaws for IE8 from the start of 2016”.
The few users who visited our page with IE8 were already subjected to a very poor user experience with no gradients, no border radius – you name it. But the developers still had to test for functionality. These days have finally drawn to a close.
No longer supporting IE8 is quite an obvious nudge designed to prompt users into switching to a modern browser. Maybe a broken user experience will do a better job than IE8’s plethora of security flaws in convincing these last few users to move on to Firefox, Chrome, Opera or a newer version of IE.
From 1 July 2015 we’ve extended the banner we used to show IE6 and IE7 users (they don’t even rank in the top 150 browsers visiting our platform) at the top of their logged-in landing page to include IE8 users as well. The banner tells users that they’re visiting XING with an old browser. We then present a link to browser.xing.com where we tell them why they should update and to what.
Let’s get rid of insecure software and make the web a better place.
