In the next version of the Scherzo theme I plan to drop full support for Internet Explorer (IE) version 8 and lower. The theme currently uses javascript to make IE scale to different viewports, which I intend to remove in version 2.3. Note that the change won’t affect IE9, which recognises media queries.

There are several reasons for dropping full support that I think outweigh any inconvenience IE users will experience:

• Scherzo will serve IE the same one column style sheet as mobile devices — the theme doesn’t ‘break’, it just looks different
• getting WordPress to serve scripts just to IE is a problem I’ve been unable to solve. Normally, I’d use conditional comments in the head section of an HTML document, but the ‘proper’ method is to register and enqueue scripts in functions.php. Unfortunately, you can’t put PHP in conditional comments. This means that all browsers, regardless of device, OS etc., load the 20k or so of javascript that only IE needs.
• the IE javascript causes problems with child themes built on Scherzo
• I have better things to do with my life than wrestle with this problem
• from a personal point of view, only 9.7% of my visitors over the last couple of weeks used version 8 or less of IE. IE9 was offered as an automatic update during this period, so I expect this number will decrease.
• Scherzo is built on a mobile first principle. It doesn’t make sense to serve mobile users on a slow connection an extra 20k of javascript just so an old desktop browser can modify the page layout.

I appreciate you may feel differently about dropping IE support (perhaps because your visitor stats are markedly different from mine). If you do, please leave a comment.