Given that IE may be the only widely-used browser that restrains web developers from going completely gung-ho with the fancy new stuff and creating even more sites that are just plain user-hostile and annoying (e.g. see the rise of superfluous SPAs and/or massive amounts of JS required to load simple static content, replacing sites that worked fine without), I fear that this will make casual browsing a worse experience even for those not using IE...
It's not the new sites which are already fancy webapps, the ones doing new things that would be nearly impossible in older browsers and require the very latest browser versions that I'm concerned about; it's the sites that cater to a mass audience like news, webmail, search engines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8254743 ), and other valuable repositories of information which are most at risk of being "appified" and making the Internet less accessible overall.
It's at least as much the case that devs load up their apps with tons of third-party junk CSS and JS to smooth over the differences between old, broken versions of IE and modern browsers. If we could count on people using reasonably modern browsers we could code to the standards and dispense with a lot of these clunky wrappers and workarounds.
That ship sailed long ago. The people who make use of all the cool new stuff either explicitly don't care about IE, or ship polyfills and then don't really check to make sure they work (because they don't care about IE).
It's not the new sites which are already fancy webapps, the ones doing new things that would be nearly impossible in older browsers and require the very latest browser versions that I'm concerned about; it's the sites that cater to a mass audience like news, webmail, search engines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8254743 ), and other valuable repositories of information which are most at risk of being "appified" and making the Internet less accessible overall.
Related article: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing...
...and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961613