> it looks like IE8 is finally falling off the radar
Some are luckier than others... I suspect one of our major clients (one of the country's largest banks) will be stuck using IE8 and nothing but for the next few years at least. They only moved off IE6 recently due to it falling out of support next April, so there is a chance they'll stick with IE8 until 2019 (the year before it and Windows 7 drop out of extended support).
At least our other major clients (smaller financial institutions) have started to see sense. While they are stuck on IE8 due to some ancient internal code that won't work on anything more correct that are at least rolling out Chrome on their standard desktops as an alternate choice for everything that doesn't rely on old IE bugs.
Seconding this - some of us designing web applications / intranet apps for banks or government have to support IE8 for the foreseeable future. We're just now starting to drop IE6 support for the new versions of our products.
When I was a contractor at a major bank, the standard was IE6, and movement towards IE8 was in progress (as Win7 was rolling out)... I don't know if they held at IE8 though, as most people I knew there have left, even the FTEs. It was an SPA that drove a lot of adoption/allowance to use Chrome/Firefox, so it may have well gone that direction since leaving.
The move from IE6 to IE8 has (pretty much universally in the investment banking industry in the UK) only been over the last year or so.
They are still pretty much all on XP, but new laptops are generally Windows 7 (with IE8) and I suspect Win7 will be rolling out to older standard builds (both desktop and laptop, machines old enough to not be Win7 compatible having been replaced already) as the first thing the relevant TS departments do after the Christmas/NewYear non-emergency-work freezes.
Some are luckier than others... I suspect one of our major clients (one of the country's largest banks) will be stuck using IE8 and nothing but for the next few years at least. They only moved off IE6 recently due to it falling out of support next April, so there is a chance they'll stick with IE8 until 2019 (the year before it and Windows 7 drop out of extended support).
At least our other major clients (smaller financial institutions) have started to see sense. While they are stuck on IE8 due to some ancient internal code that won't work on anything more correct that are at least rolling out Chrome on their standard desktops as an alternate choice for everything that doesn't rely on old IE bugs.