NursingJobs concludes that it's cheaper to purchase new computers for its customers than to keep supporting Microsoft's 2006-era browser.

For some folks, that elderly computer saddled with out-of-date software just turned into a ticket to a shiny new machine.
That's because NursingJobs, a site that connects nurses with employers that want to hire them, said it'll buy computers for some of its customers who are still using Microsoft's old IE7 browser.
"We are offering to buy a new computer with a modern browser for any of our customers who are stuck with IE7," said NursingJobs' Robert Gentel in a blog post the other day. "We determined that it would cost us more to support a browser from 2006 in 2014 and beyond than it would to help our clients upgrade their legacy hardware."
A free new computer sounds like a good deal, but some people in corporate environments don't have a choice. Indeed, the need for compatibility with older in-house applications is often a key reason that old browsers linger even for people who'd personally move to modern software.
Supporting older browsers is often a struggle for Web developers who want to take advantage of new programming interfaces and faster JavaScript performance. Chrome and Firefox now automatically update themselves, but the browser market was a slower-moving place in 2006. Microsoft hasn't pushed aggressively toward auto-updating Internet Explorer, arguing that some customers don't like software that changes underneath them frequently. But it is trying to move into the future with modern features in its newest versions of IE and with an effort to coax IE6 users to upgrade.
NursingJobs recently launched a new jobs board and decided that IE7 support wasn't feasible. About 1.2 percent of its users are using IE7.
"The new site uses a more modern interface that supports the mobiles and tablets that our users increasingly prefer," Gentel said. "Unfortunately, this also means that we have had to make the decision to leave Internet Explorer 7 users behind, a decision we did not take lightly."