Actively doing something that predictably results in 7.6% less traffic to your profit generating website seems quite the questionable business decision.
Assuming IE11 users are otherwise representative of the customer base, multiply your total web based revenue by 7.6%. (If this assumption is wrong, then just check your reports to get the correct number.) If, for example, the business in question makes $10M yearly revenue, your estimate has 7 entire devs working exclusively on IE11 support fulltime, year round.
That is one fancy as fuck ecommerce site to be that reliant on features in modern browsers that lack automated transcompilation/shim generating tooling.
Are there actually IE11 bugs at a noticeably higher rate than bugs (or intentional deprecations) in other browsers? I thought we were just talking about a lack of new features that are present in Edge.
(If you were talking about IE5 or IE6 I'd understand the argument.)
most ie11 bugs that are relevant/annoying are around its flexbox impl. specifically equal height boxes via min-height and such. maybe some other fancy css animation or 3d transform stuff, but these are not terribly critical and can degrade without much impact.
thankfully, js and dom bugs are either rare or well-known and have lightweight polyfills.
would you find it acceptable if 1 of every 13 customers was unable to use your ecommerce site after you paid good money to acquire him/her via ads?
7.6% is a huge number. we dont even start discussions until traffic is < 2% (and also a huge pain in the ass to support). IE11 is not actually that terrible.
7.6% can be absolutely HUGE. I have to support Samsung "The Internet" version 2.1.... and that's about 1% of traffic. But the amount that that still brings in in a single month is enough to pay a developers yearly salary.
it does appear to be declining ~0.2% per month, but it's a long way off from dead :(