For a generic 'tech' answer, I'd make sure the basic functionality works on IE, if ugly, and concentrate on Firefox and Chrome. (And if you do, Opera and Safari usually work without changes.)
For example, two of our products are (i) A film submission form field and (ii) A schedule for the screenings at the festival.
With basic IE support for both, we noticed <3% of the traffic using IE for the "Submission forms" and ~40% of our traffic to the "Schedules" use IE for a festival in Phoenix.
In hindsight this makes sense. Most people submitting films are the filmmakers or their crew- think Apple's primary target market, hence Safari and FF is what we see a lot of. We've stopped incremental updates for IE on the submission form as long as it remains functional.
However, people looking at schedules are at their enterprise jobs possibly in Phoenix during the day and trying to figure out what films to catch after work. That might explain the high prevalence of IE.
While it is obvious in hindsight, these are not assumptions I would be willing to make without looking at hard data specific to my product. Regardless of whether it's Tech or Filmmaker centric.
Edit: Clarity.
Within the last two weeks code was checked in to allow non-admin level installs, so when that debuts everyone that gets prompted can actually install it.
We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate 2% of users. Hell, until very recently, our bookmarklet didn't work with IE (some XSS security settings? We never figured it out), but now it eschews the nice overlay it uses for other browsers and just bookmarks stuff. It's ugly, but it works, if our users want a better experience we recommend switching to a better browser.
edit: also, if the service is still new, you might largely be getting early adopters and not supporting IE could inhibit growth.
I totally understand and agree with this sentiment. I do find it rather ironic, however, that developers today are using the same arguments for ignoring IE that were used for ignoring Firefox users 5+ years ago. Firefox users made a huge fuss about sites that were IE-only, and now many of those same users are returning the favor.
We're not trying to be mean, we'd love to support everyone, but when it comes to spending a day trying to find and fix an IE-only bug that affects 2% of your userbase (sure, it might be a bit higher if we didn't have the bug in the first place) or write a feature that will improve the service for 100% of the userbase, the latter takes priority...
I figured this might be interesting for some of you, although we're less technology...
Sorry if I'm asking too much; it's really great when people post "private" statistics.
So what to take away from this? If you're a startup, you should be prioritising, not obsessing. And high on the list is making money, not making a marginal number of users happy, handling politics, or premature optimisation (eg. writing code that works across all browsers).
One thing we messed up on: not creating a kick-ass UX on Mac from day 1. We fixed it in the meantime, but we're developers using Windows, and a significant portion of our userbase is designers on Macs. So Safari, Firefox, Chrome and especially things like Mac font rendering and UI controls needed to be lickety-split.
My users are scientist and researchers, but not all of them are completely computer literate. I hand hold them a little bit with the setup.
Part of my user base is also scientists and researchers, so I'm curious what your app or website is.
We're currently in an invite-only beta. But among our few hundred users, we're definitely seeing a skew towards Firefox / Webkit and away from IE. That said, the combined versions of IE are still 40% of our traffic. And I'm fairly convinced that IE share will grow as our product enters open registration.
That said, we decided to abandon IE 6 support during development. Metrics so far indicate that this was the right decision. We're only seeing 2% of our requests coming from that abomination.
We're also not doing anything special for IE 7 & 8. They get the uglified version of the UI sans opacity, drop shadows, gradients, rounded corners, etc. I'm setting up analytics right now to see if browser version affects our conversion rate. I'm betting it doesn't.
Of course, we're not doing anything terribly unusual. We have no burning need for the canvas element, for example. So supporting IE 7 & 8 hasn't been terrible for us. I'd imagine that's a significant limitation for other start-ups.
We're also a traditionally funded company. So we have the luxury of being a bit more ambitious with our initial product. If we were bootstrapping and attempting to find customer fit, I'd probably just target the latest Firefox / Webkit.
In my experience jQuery abstracts away most of the incompatibilities.
There are blue Googles and green Googles. The blue Googles and green Googles can't talk to each other. This is why you need to use only your school website number to sign into BCC when you're on the blue Googles but you should use your AOL website number to sign in when you're on the green Googles.
Technical support in non-technical markets often involves very interesting forensic reconstruction of customer mental models.
Seriously though, "forensic reconstruction of customer mental models" sounds like a blog post I'd love reading, especially if it were an ongoing series.
And Chrome? 64% on my personal blog, and a Linux majority at that, single digits on this school website.
It really depends on your audience.
If your site doesn't work in IE, then you will show fewer IE users as a result.
Now, the premise seems plausible, but you can't back up that premise with data that I know a priori is skewed to support that premise.
This actually played some role in my decision in taking the job- this was still in 2008, when ignoring IE was essentially almost never an option. Better, was that the extension views were developed in CSS- so I was free to explore CSS3 much earlier in live projects.
More timely, even as a website we still have very little focus on supporting IE users.
IE makes up for < 7% of our total visitors, and IE6 only 4% of that. More interestingly, a lot of our visitors now come through consumer markets like HBO and Fox. I think the numbers are surprisingly low for IE already; but considering our market is no longer a techie market (quite the opposite), the numbers are somewhat more interesting.
That all said, I think this speaks true to the title of the article. It's just a careful decision you need to make- but fortunately not one that is impossible to solve quickly, should you make the wrong one.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/
http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/
Your own browser stats are skewed at this moment, I wouldn't base any important decisions on them.
One interesting tidbit from Statcounter:
In Europe FF usage has caught up to IE, they are both around 40%.
In North America IE has double the usage of FF, with IE at ~50%.
I agree that your own stats are the best source, but not when you've only been public for less than a month and half your audience is coming from the likes of HN and Techcrunch.
I'd say it wouldn't; I reckon content produced for the web should always allow people the freedom to choose how they view it.
Not supporting IE6 is something I could maybe understand - but forgetting about IE7 and IE8, because of time constraints, is a maybe bit lazy.
It's not that difficult to use principles of progressive enhancement and a CSS resets script to iron out inconsistencies.
I am running a company in a similar sector (tech related util software), and IE visits are more than 60%. Not to mention, that most corporate users have as a rigid requirement and you are effectively killing a lot of revenue potential.
So no - my advice is do not do it, support IE.
At the very least the advice is to take your audience into account, and if you are in this particular sector not supporting ie is a doable tradeoff.
if anyone gives an absolute statement that you should support ie, or you shouldnt support ie, unless they understand both the exact demographics you are targeting, and the internal structure of your company as well as the technical details of your product, they are wrong.
However, once you launch, IE visitors become the majority - at least in my particular case (in a sector that seems similar to what the blog post says). Even if the purchasing decision makers are not using IE, in my particular case many of the licensed users will be just corporate/normal job types, and IE is the majority there.
Just my $0.02, your case may be different.
