Answering to their clients

Your organization has clients or users which help to keep the lights on, whether internal or external. Your manager’s manager will need to understand how many of these users this decision could affect and what possible scenarios the affected users could run into.

You can answer the first question by using a service such as StatCounter which shows browser support by region. Using this tool, you can select your geographical area and which browsers you would like to see stats for. Your goal is to find a chart which shows a serious decline trending towards zero for the browser you are trying to drop.

An example from StatCounter which shows trending browser usage

Pro tip: Download a snazzy chart to include in your business case and for +1000XP make a Powerpoint deck which your manager can share with others.

If you have access to your company’s analytics account you will then want to pull stats on your organization’s digital assets to cross-check what the browser usage looks like there as well. Note that you may need to calculate the public browser usage if your internal team’s corporate PCs are pre-built with the browser you are trying to drop support for.

Ultimately by showing that usage is declining you can demonstrate that the effort and cost to support the browser outweighs the benefit of supporting it.

Additionally, it can bolster your case to provide a few points around what the user experience would be like on an unsupported legacy browser.