My stats show that legacy Internet Explorer users rarely come to my site, so why spend time coding for them? Many of these people are probably die-hard Windows XP users, and I know they wanted to stay with XP because everyone hated Vista, but Windows 7 is really nice. I haven’t transitioned to Windows 8, but I do know that IE10 and IE11 render very nicely.
Legacy versions of Internet Explorer don’t support many CSS3 and HTML5 features that I consider essential. I also wanted to use jQuery 2. I get to lose conditional comments, and feature detection. I don’t have to worry about stupid IE bugs, and I don’t have to use any IE specific CSS hacks either.
Google dropped support for IE8 a long time ago. What do you think? Is it a risk you’re willing to take? For me the benefits outweigh any risk that may be involved.