Discourse will be dropping IE9 support in 2016

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6557?hl=en

In general, Gmail supports the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. If you use a browser other than those, you’ll be automatically directed to the basic HTML view of Gmail.

So the basic HTML view will be more important for us… but note that basic HTML is a read only view for Discourse.