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I'm debating whether or not to start using CSS variables. They're wonderful gifts from heaven ... except that Internet Explorer does not support them and never will.

According to Net Market Share IE still (and inexplicably) represents about a third of browsers.

At what point is it safe to assume that old browsers can be ignored? Should I use their support life as a measure, or their marketshare usage?

  • The application I'm building supports the development and retail sales of ebooks.

  • Let me be more clear about the phrase "safe to assume." I'm a one-man shop and supporting a multitude of browser-version pairs is time consuming. Therefore, "safe to assume" means, "I'm going to tell people that I don't support that browser-version, please upgrade, sorry...." In other words, I'm trying to understand the impact of writing off market segments (e.g., people still using IE 9, etc.). IE is only my case example. In a sense, I'm looking to understand where I can turn away old-tech users without getting too many negative social media reviews.

Thomas Owens
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JBH
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  • Where do you see that IE is 1/3 of the market share? On the page you linked to, I'm seeing IE at about 13% of the share. That's far less than ~33%. – Thomas Owens Dec 06 '17 at 11:51
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    This question [has a discussion on our Meta site](https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8653/first-time-user-suggestion-for-improved-on-topic-clarity). – Thomas Owens Dec 06 '17 at 11:57
  • @ThomasOwens Even at 13.1%, that's pretty much the same percentage as Firefox's 13.5%. I'd hazard a statement that supporting the currently available and supported (thus including long term support releases and similar) of the top 3-4 browsers is probably a very good idea... – user Dec 06 '17 at 14:25
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    ...though of course, @JBH, you probably shouldn't look at some statistics gathered by someone random. Look at your own statistics! Run some analysis on the data that you do have, including historical access logs, and make decisions based on that. As a bonus, you could then see which parts of your site are accessed using different browsers. If IE users are only browsing but never buying, that's different to if the IE conversion ratio is 90% and for every other browser it's 2%. – user Dec 06 '17 at 14:27
  • @MichaelKjörling, it's a good idea, but it's also a new site. I have no "live" statistics to work with. That's why I used Net Market Share. – JBH Dec 07 '17 at 00:26

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