This is one of those times I wish HN wasn't so strict about the title of the submission matching the title of the article--this title is extremely misleading. (As a guest post, I'm guessing the author didn't get to write the title, so I'm not blaming him). 4ormat didn't "drop" IE, they never supported it. As a result, their calculation of how much they "saved" appears to be based on some back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much more expensive it would have been to develop for IE over a period of years.
tl;dr: if you build a tool which solves a significant and recurring pain point for creative professionals, you can get away with not supporting IE.
The article does not provide much insight into building a consumer-facing application--this is the equivalent of a company using an intranet app which is IE6-specific.
Yes, the 100K is based on a back-of-the-envelope, but for a startup with zero revenue every development and design hour we can spare helps us focus on the real task at hand: figuring out our market fit and making a great product.
This is less about supporting this browser or that browser and more about making sound business decisions and putting our users’ needs first. We’d like to think they would rather see requested features over support for a browser they don’t use.
I thought the one of the explicit rules was to remove "Insert number ways/apps to increase productivity" and similar enumerations from titles. I also thought there was a general rule of thumb to remove hyperbole?
Well there was the case of one of the original airbnb scandal submissions [1] having it's title changed from:
"AirBnB: Crimes committed against a host"
to:
"Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned"
The rational at the time was that the change was done since the original title didn't match that of the linked blog post -- see pg's comment[2]. The counterargument being that the original title helped increase awareness of an important story that would have been harder to accomplish with the generic title.
It drives up links due to an emotional reaction. If your linking to a post called 'lost sheep' and you could change it to 'efficient distributed counting' because that's more descriptive and without spin. But, 'lost sheep (distributed counting)' is more in the spirit of HN IMO.
tl;dr: if you build a tool which solves a significant and recurring pain point for creative professionals, you can get away with not supporting IE.
The article does not provide much insight into building a consumer-facing application--this is the equivalent of a company using an intranet app which is IE6-specific.