I am sorry Internet Explorer.. this cannot go on!
The time has come.. it had to eventually. I know we are probably slightly off the curve on this but it is just no longer viable to "try" and support Internet Explorer 7 and 8 within modern coding practices/quotes.
I have made the decision that from now on we will only provide this support if specifically requested by clients. Either that or specifically state that we are not using HTML5 or more advanced CSS as their main audience demographic is actually still people running IE7 on Windows XP.
We have been trying to please everyone and, as the fable says this is not really possible.
The straw that broke the camels back was a recent mini project that went from a cleanly coded interactive experience to a mashup of fixes and hacks. As it happened it also went from an efficient within budget project to a massively over budget mishap!
We calculated that it took 150% of the actual time to build the microsite to then make IE8 happy. IE8 may have been happy but we were not, as we toiled to make it do something similar to the elegant canvas based solution we had initially built.
It really brought home to me how much time we spend trying to hack away at our nice tidy code and for some time had meant we resisted embracing useful new tech because of the inevitable need to add in extra legacy code.
A lesson learnt though and so from now on legacy browser development will be an extra line on our quotes.
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