IE8 Yes or No?

Will it cost you more to spend time worrying about IE8 than IE8 generates?

IE8 is pretty much dead in terms of support for it https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search?sort=PN&alpha=internet%20explorer

Beginning Jan 2016, only the latest version will be updated.

If you still have users hitting your site and it's not too difficult to get working but not necessarily fully functional (i.e. The layout is generally the same) operation, I can't see why not.

I don't think we're going to continue to see the longevity of IE8 like we did 6/7, though, and if any extra styles to accommodate 8/9/10 are bloating the file size and slowing page load, you could probably show a case that way.

I'm quite conservative about browser support as a lot of our users don't upgrade very often (I still have one user who insists on using MacOS 9!). But usually for IE when Microsoft themselves cut it off I'm quite happy to point that out to users and that they can keep their old version and just run FF/Chrome for this one app if it really needs it. But I generally don't do anything 'fancy' with CSS/JS so it's fairy rare I run into it.

The only thing I've done recently that needed > IE8 was a horribly complicated form that I used vue.js for - the time and maintenance overhead of mangling the JS/DOM myself would have outweighed the cost of prodding people to use a current browser.

Why not pop them to upgrade/change their browser?

Or you could do like some and just write the code so it on works on the very latest iphones, and computers that are newer than 3 months old. Or you could use common sense and support at least 7 years back. Please no reply I really don't care, because I get sick and tired of people thinking only the "latest technology matters".

@jlrdw but this is a case where the vendor themselves is withdrawing support - no more fixes, no more security updates. If MS were supporting it I'd be with you as far as you can go in a specific project, but they're the ones pulling the plug on their users. I mostly use OS's with 10yr+ lifecycles and I get annoyed when relatively straightforward projects need newer features for no particularly good reason - but once the vendor pulls support out then it's time to move on no matter what you think :-)

I can see Ie6 and back but even with support ending, quite a few people and companies still run vista, and ie7 and ie8. Funny thing, if code is done right, not necessarily latest, old and new browsers can still view.

I think Microsoft not supporting it anymore is your best case - if those customers continue to use an unsupported browser they are opening themselves up to security concerns and issues that will never be resolved. Idk how much ~£20,000 represents in terms of your business's revenue percentage but unless its a significant portion then spending time on it is just holding the business back since thats time and money that could be spent somewhere else helping to grow the business and keep existing customers and gain new ones who use supported browsers that would potentially be worth much more than ~£20,000.

I agree with @ltrain it all depends on revenue, and most of the time the costs to support end of life browsers far outweighs the total revenue.The older the browser gets the revenue said browser generates will dissipate, your revenue this time next year will more than likely be less than ~20k. Our company does not support IE8 mainly because our development team is quite small and do not have the resource, which may also be another factor?

@Sam This is a business decision. We don’t know the business or its users. Look at your analytics and see how many of your users visit using IE 8. Make a decision based on that data and that data alone.

I just want to say a big thank you to all of the responses, many informative and well constructed and given me a lot to go on.

Whilst I accept that a business decision does need to be made here I was also trying to look at it from a general web point of view, had it been from a business and revenue point alone it would have gone favourably in the way of ensuring it was as every bit functional as the website in chrome.

I noticed that Laracasts isn't optimised in anyway for IE8 but then again the demographic here is completely different, although places such as Tesco and Asda also don't put any special thought into IE8.

Once again, thanks again for the responses, I'll take your responses back to management and go from there!

This almost always comes down to target audience. Analytics plays a huge part in this decision too. If your developing laracasts, obviously ie8 support should be none. But you developing a food recipe site you may want too.

Laracasts audience should be tech savy users that generally run the newer versions of OS and browsers. Where the recipe site would be xp on up, androids, iOS, OS X, chrome OS etc. the gambit if you will.

On a side note edge is using chrome's way of updating and not suppose to use completely different versions though it will be years to phase out ie.

The analytics should show you a number of current users that use ie8 then out way the pros and cons

@jekinney makes since. But a point here is even though most users here on forum may have latest gadgets, they should be taught about the gambit as you said. Even mobile devices, some folks don't buy a new phone every 6 months, my neighbors cell is a smart phone but around 3 years old.