title: At which point do you decide to stop supporting older browsers?
body: <p>I would like to start a community discussion.  As per my question, when do you decide to stop supporting older browsers?</p>
  
  <p>I've nearly completed the development of a large personal application. It uses a lot of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. If I were to support older browsers, I would estimate that it would increase my front end work load by at least 50%. And to be frank, I don't want to support the older browsers.  From a business point of view, one could argue that if I don't, I could lose revenue. I disagree.  I feel that the customers who use older browsers wouldn't be the customers I would want anyway - they would be the ones giving me more work as I'd have to fix compatibility problems in my application to work with their old browser or have to continually tell them to upgrade their browser. If the web is to move on, then people need to stop supporting the older browsers, however, I do see that the tide is slowly starting to turn towards this.</p>
  
  <p>Recently, IE6 was pronounced dead. When can we safely say that IE7 and IE8 or indeed Firefox 3 can longer be considered as 'important' enough to support? </p>
  
  <p>Furthermore, I hear a lot of people say on this site "make sure it degrades gracefully so it'll still work with browsers that don't have JavaScript support"? What kind of browsers now don't have JavaScript support? Mostly old phones  and if these old phones don't support JavaScript then I highly doubt that they will parse the HTML correctly either. I also have a Sencha touch mobile version of my application. Am I going to make a WAP version of it to support older phones? No. It's a rich web app. That's how it has designed to be and that's how I intend for it to stay.</p>
  
  <p>I rather like Apple's approach: If you upgrade your OS, don't expect your apps from the previous of the OS to work with the new one. Yes, it can be a frustration, but it means there is less of a mess overrall and people are forced to upgrade to move along with the times.</p>
  
  <p>It works the same way for new web apps, if I want to keep them clean, quick and efficient, I need to stop hacking the code to support legacy software and if users don't like it, they can move on from my site or join the rest of us and upgrade their browser and have a better web experience.</p>
  
  <p>I don't want this to come across as arrogant, but I am genuinely interested in your opinions when you consider enough is enough and only support recent browsers.</p>