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Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

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Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#11
post #8
post #2

Do you think they'll really drop IE8 once IE10 is released next year? Firefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? Actually, it would be great if Google could nudge everyone to keep upgrading.

Firefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? This would cause problems for anyone on Debian squeeze.

We're using IceWeasel which will, as per Debian's usual policy, still be supported with security fixes.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory I agree with you, but at some point people are going to get tired of the upgrade forces and stop using Google apps.

Why would they be tired? Is it a pain to upgrade? (I admit I've become used to chrome upgrading in the background).

It is if you're in a large organization, or you want to make sure thngs don't break before you release them to your users.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#13
post #2

Do you think they'll really drop IE8 once IE10 is released next year? Firefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? Actually, it would be great if Google could nudge everyone to keep upgrading.

They'll drop support once the costs become significant relative to the number of users. Right now, older IE versions have a much higher cost due to being built on an antique rendering engine - Firefox 3.6 is generally far less expensive unless you actually depend on certain more recent features because it wasn't missing support for so many basic features (e.g. think of the impact on your CSS without something like inline-block versus, say, box-shadow).

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#14
post #2

Do you think they'll really drop IE8 once IE10 is released next year? Firefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? Actually, it would be great if Google could nudge everyone to keep upgrading.

They can't drop IE8 because too many businesses are still on XP.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#15
post #12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they be tired? Is it a pain to upgrade? (I admit I've become used to chrome upgrading in the background).

It is if you're in a large organization, or you want to make sure thngs don't break before you release them to your users.

The upgrade difficulties in large organizations are often brought upon themselves with poor adherance to public standards and insufficient test automation. Last I checked, Google itself is a large organization, and they don't seem to have any worries over the rate at which software gets updated.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#16
I'm quite grateful to Google for this. As a web developer, I'd always hoped that some big industry player would start forcing people to use modern browsers, and now it's happening.

As small players, dropping support for older browsers kind of pulls us into the morass of a Nash equilibrium. Everyone would benefit if all web developers could agree on requiring modern browsers. We'd all be saved the pain of supporting old browsers, and users would upgrade because every site forces them to. But as an individual web developer, I can't very well just make that call and hope others will follow suit. Because until everyone else does the same, I'm stuck telling my clients they're giving up visitors with older browsers "for the greater good." Not workable. So my current best strategy is to support older browsers, and the same is true for each other developer. Yet as a whole industry, we'd be way better off dropping old browsers.

But a huge player like Google can afford to do it unilaterally. And when they do, they create an opportunity for countless small developers like me to do the same.

I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon just yet. I plan to embrace this cautiously. We still don't know when it will be safe for freelancers and small companies to drop IE 7 and other dinosaurs. But I predict that day will come much sooner thanks to Google.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#17
post #5
post #2

Do you think they'll really drop IE8 once IE10 is released next year? Firefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? Actually, it would be great if Google could nudge everyone to keep upgrading.

And once again, they list specific version numbers for IE, Firefox, and Safari, but just say "Chrome" for Chrome, even though later it groups Chrome with the rest of the two most recent. I guess it's because they don't know for sure what versions of Chrome will be the two most recent released, but it's still kind of funny.

I'm going to go with the fact that unless you NEVER restart your browser, the likelihood is that you are one or two minor versions behind the latest Chrome code at worst. With Chrome's automagical update system, most users barely notice when an update comes down the pike.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#18
post #14
post #2

Do you think they'll really drop IE8 once IE10 is released next year? Firefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? Actually, it would be great if Google could nudge everyone to keep upgrading.

They can't drop IE8 because too many businesses are still on XP.

The latest builds of Firefox and Chrome both work fine on XP, so they could theoretically force users to upgrade away from IE altogether.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#19
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? This would cause problems for anyone on Debian squeeze.

We're using IceWeasel which will, as per Debian's usual policy, still be supported with security fixes.

"Security fixes" doesn't include support for any new features that Google Apps chooses to use without considering older Firefox versions.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#20
This is what really irks me about Google Apps. You don't have any control over this kind of thing. They can (and do) yank the rug out from under you whenever they feel like it. A while back, they forcibly transitioned all accounts to also be normal Google accounts, with no user input. They did this before they figure out how to transition users who already had Google accounts, so now my users are split into first class and second class citizens.

It really doesn't feel like it should be the hard for Google to have some infrastructure where the user can control version transitions. Google makes a new version, but barring security issues, keeps all old versions in their cloud. At that point, you transition when you're ready.

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