Developing for the web means developing for a wide range of browsers, the bad news is there are still quite a few older browsers in use that makes life needlessly difficult for web developers everywhere, requiring workarounds and alternate solutions all over the place.
Supporting these older browsers costs developers time and effort that could be spent making sites and web apps perform better, look better and well, just be better.
A modern browser is a browser that supports all of the technologies we rely on today: CSS3, XHR2, HTML5, WOFF & ECMA Script 5 and so on. That actually covers quite a larger number of browsers on the market today, current versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and even old Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 all fit the bill.
The biggest issue is Microsofts Internet Explorer, due to the relatively high popularity and poor conformance to modern standards in versions prior to 11. IE 11 is still not perfect but it tends to be close enough to work without any special work needed.
The good news is that as time passes older versions of Internet Explorer (IE) are becoming less common, giving us a much more robust baseline to work with. In fact we see a growing trend, especially amongst SaaS providers of discontinuing support for older browsers, though they may still work to some extent. I'd like to propose we take it even further and start to actively prevent users with anything older tan IE 11 from accessing things altogether. Why? Because it would not only save us a lot of headaches, it would actually also give users a better experience, not only with whatever we create, but the web in general.
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I have chosen to actively block access to this site for users of older browsers, instead of the blog you get this page. A better option than that trivial little thing though would probably be some kind of standardized "hey you need to update to a modern browser, since you are on platform so and so, follow these steps". If anyone has the hours to spare or know of such a page, let me know =)