Kill it with fire!

That's an en_INTERNET idiom. Do you want me to sic the internationalisation team on you? Cuz I will.

This is a WONTFIX; Internet Explorer in general doesn't support many of the key technologies that VisualEditor relies upon, and this becomes more acute the further back from IE10 you get.

Supporting "just" IE9 and IE10 has been approximately 90% of our browser-specific workload; for IE8 support, we would need to write an entirely parallel implementation of VisualEditor just for that (and even then, most things wouldn't work).

We cannot justify spending a very significant amount of donors' funds on IE8, which is (as of May) less than 5% of all our readers, and likely even less than that for editors. See [[mw:VisualEditor/Target browser matrix]] (which needs to be updated) for detail about which browsers we actively support.

Makes a lot of sense. Any specific technologies that are problematic? Just so I can avoid coming off as "we're not doing it, it's hard".

(In reply to comment #4)

Makes a lot of sense. Any specific technologies that are problematic? Just
so I can avoid coming off as "we're not doing it, it's hard".

Primary technologies:

• HTML 5, most notably with ContentEditable (IE8 has basic support; IE in general has major issues with elements that aren't editable inside ones that are - e.g. templates inside pages - though we've found a way to hack around it in IE9&10 for now)
• Javascript (ECMAScript) 5 (not all of it, which is good as IE9 doesn't do that either, but more than IE8 supports)
• Selection interaction (IE's support is... Quixotic, to be polite)
• Key detection/over-riding (same as for selection)

Great! Thanks.