This isn't really true anymore. All the major browser vendors push out new releases pretty frequently. Even Apple and Microsoft tend to put out a new release at least every six months or so. And because of the ubiquity of software / OS updates, these tend to get deployed to the majority of users fairly rapidly.
For example, consider a feature like arrow function support in JavaScript: http://caniuse.com/#feat=arrow-functions
Click "usage relative" to scale by the relative popularity of different browser versions.
Despite only being standardised and implemented in browsers last year, arrow functions are already supported in the large majority of deployed web clients, including Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, both desktop and mobile.
Nowadays, new features, particularly relatively small and uncontroversial ones like display: flex-root, can get implemented across browsers very quickly.
A lot of people still have to support IE10/11, including myself - until browser support is mostly on evergreen browsers & browsers keep up to date on implementing the new standards, ability to use the standards hinges upon a couple of years buffer in some cases.
As I already said: browser support is mostly on evergreen browsers, and browsers do keep up to date implementing the new standards. The stats make this very clear. To say otherwise is to promote a view of the world that is ten years out of date.
IE10/11 are at about ~4% global usage. Less than Opera Mini. And a large number of those users will have access to another browser. We've found many enterprises keep IE around to access legacy services, but let people install Chrome in order to access things that need a modern browser.
The days when it was worth supporting IE for new development work has long since passed. Company policies that mandate doing so should be challenged as a waste of time and money.
it doesn't mean anything for a business. for all you know 50% of users visiting a specific website could still be using IE10/11. global numbers were always irrelevant.
4% is a high number in this context. If I cause a problem for 4% of my users, I will be spending the next week answering support issues and nothing else. When it is two orders of magnitude less, then we can talk.
Yeah: 4% of users of my site means like 40,000 people :/. For websites that sell things, I always think of it in terms of "if you could do some more engineering work and get 4% more revenue, would you?". I do not understand people who feel like 4% is some tiny number.
But that revenue isn't free. It has a cost in terms of time and effort in engineering the IE support, and then maintaining it. This is time and effort that could be better spent enhancing the site in other ways. For example, ~20% of the US population has a disability[1]. Investing effort in improving accessibility would be more sensible, economically speaking, than maintaining IE support, but I still see developers spending hours working around IE CSS bugs, while doing almost nothing to improve accessibility.
Most of the people in that 20% likely have a disability that keeps them from working or walking but not from using a computer in a normal fashion.
That said, you are responding to my incredulity, and I take disabilities sufficiently at least sufficiently seriously that a blind person presents every year at the conference we have been running for our ecosystem and we get tons of praise for our support of their issues.
In some cases, I will even argue that supporting old browsers is related to accessibility: if you are making a product such as a communications tool, one where many if not most users don't directly pay you for their use as you make money from a subset of users, people on older browsers are often people with older computers, who have lower income and less ability to arbitrarily plunk down money to upgrade their technology.
Just as we legally mandate people consider the needs of the disabled, I personally think we might be in need of some regulation that demands we also consider the needs of the poor and disconnected: there are tons of users (by which I mean "entire percentage points, by number competitive with blind people as a group of users but with less sympathy from the public") using older versions of browsers because they were stranded by Apple on an older iPod or iPhone with an out-of-date version of MobileSafari, or who would have to pay for a new version of Windows to even be able to use Chrome, or whose only access to a computer is a shared facility where the computers run something they have no control over. When we build websites that don't let them use our service, we essentially are building an implicit class hierarchy.
I'd imagine the 20% of the US population that has a disability translates into rather less than 4% of potential users of the average website helped by any particular engineering solution...
(apart from basic common-sense design principles like not having tiny buttons or a layout so sensitive it breaks if people bump the text size up)
Me challenging them is what got me not supporting IE9 :) .
Global usage is not the number that matters for businesses though - it's userbase percentage, and unfortunately that number for IE is quite higher than I'd like (over 10%).
For example, consider a feature like arrow function support in JavaScript: http://caniuse.com/#feat=arrow-functions Click "usage relative" to scale by the relative popularity of different browser versions.
Despite only being standardised and implemented in browsers last year, arrow functions are already supported in the large majority of deployed web clients, including Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, both desktop and mobile.
Nowadays, new features, particularly relatively small and uncontroversial ones like display: flex-root, can get implemented across browsers very quickly.