Unless you're a large company that makes significant revenue from IE, this is an easy decision. For larger corporations, the stakes are much higher. Websites the size of Amazon, for example, can generate tens of millions of dollars from IE users, even if they represent less than 1% of their overall traffic.
Source statcounter.com
Still, any site of this scale will benefit more from reduced support, thanks to reduced load times and performance that are important to the company's bottom line. For large companies, the latest phone number database question isn't whether it's worth spending a little extra development time to ensure backwards compatibility. The question is whether you risk degrading the experience for the vast majority of users by reducing performance and the capabilities provided by modern features. By discouraging developers from caring about new technologies, you're holding them back from innovating and building the best product they can.
This is a very valuable experience for developers who are curious and inquisitive enough to learn and keep up with new technology. By supporting IE, you are essentially shielding developers from all that is new.
By using the latest technology, you improve the developer experience, enabling them to be more productive and enabling them to deliver a product that provides a better user experience than IE.
Web development is hard
Earlier in 2019, it was reported that car rental company Hertz had sued Accenture for tens of millions of dollars. Accenture is a Fortune Global 500 company worth billions of dollars. However, Hertz claimed that despite the sky-high price tags, they “never delivered a functional website or mobile app.”
As The Register wrote :
One of the most outlandish allegations in the Hertz lawsuit was that Accenture failed to support responsive design... Despite Accenture delaying the project by five months, with numerous bugs in the code, the company told Hertz it would cost an additional $10 million to complete the project, on top of the $32 million it had already paid.
The Accenture/Hertz affair is an example of stunning ineptitude, but it’s also a stark reminder that web development is hard. Yet most companies fail to take advantage of what could make it easier. There’s a reason Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple are investing heavily in developing new browser features. The improvements and innovations that have come to browsers in recent years have expanded what can be delivered on the web platform while making developers’ lives easier.
Move fast and think about the future
The development industry loves terms like “flexible” and “disruptive,” which imply easy innovation. But instead of focusing on features that create great experiences for the vast majority of users, we’re stuck using one outdated browser.
All companies are constantly faced with maintaining technically obsolete code. Obsolete code is something that slows down web development and holds you back. Without the ability to take advantage of what modern browsers offer, the code we write today is obsolete code the moment it is written.
For the modern web, it's important not only to improve performance today, but also to create code that's easier to maintain in the future. From a long-term perspective, this is the right decision.
Attraction and Retention
Of course, developer happiness is not considered by some interested companies as an important factor in the development of a finished product. However, hiring good specialists is notoriously difficult.
Compared to other industries, the level of developer competence is low. But nothing hurts morale more than days of debugging IE.
In a Mozilla survey of 76,118 developers, “supporting specific browsers (e.g. IE11)” was the most frustrating thing about web development. “Adapting or removing a feature that doesn’t work across browsers” was third, while cross-browser testing was fourth. The decision to end support for IE will minimize these frustrations and help with recruiting and retaining talent.
