Claidio,

From your reply to "Page Does Not Display Properly in IE8" to Nenad it seems you were not prepared to provide any further support for IE8.

I guess I'll receive a similar response to my own question "Different Results in various Browsers", If you think IE8 is a Dodo perhaps you should read a post from some-one who works in the real world.

Gerry Gagel

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by Stuart Clarke-Frisby Oct 18, 2013 12:55pm

I am going to outline why for us IE8 support is a long way from going the way of the dodo, ditto IE6 and IE7 for that matter.

Our focus is always squarely on the user, and so long as there is a commercially viable segment of the global accommodation-booking public who deign to, or are forced to use an old browser, we'll do our best to make that is pain-free for them as we do everyone else. Of course, some things get left behind, and in the case of IE6 we recently decided to serve an orphaned and simplified site as performance and upkeep became weightier than the commercial benefit of full support.

Suffice it to say - IE8 constitutes a significant and profitable part of our user-base, in fact, I'd wager that if you took our IE6-8 business alone and created a new business out of it, that entity would likely be amongst the worlds most profitable e-commerce properties.

It's also worth considering where you want your business to grow - you could look at your browser stats today and see that you have a tiny percentage of people using old-IE, but if you have aspirations in China, the Indian sub-continent, or Eastern Europe, then that's going to massively impact your browser mix. And not supporting those users is going to impact your ability to gauge demand for your product if it isn't accessible to 30-40% of your new target groups.

It always surprises me that the accessibility debate stops short of requiring from website makers that their websites are able to support those people who are limited not by physical or mental faculty, but by software or hardware constraints, licensing headaches (see pirated Windows XP software update nightmare), lack of technical understanding, etc.

Yes, the landscape is changing, and yes the ROI for supporting our troublesome old foes is diminishing, but until it diminishes to zero, there's opportunity, and as long as there is opportunity - someone will be clever enough to figure out a profitable way to take advantage of it.

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