I'm all in favor of anything that puts upgrade pressure on users of IE 6 and 7, but this rolling "current and previous major releases" idea is silly. They should simply establish minimum browser requirements like everybody else and update them when it makes sense to, not arbitrarily leaving it to whenever the browser makers release new versions.
Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
21–30 of 144 posts
Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
#22I'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 o…
As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look slightly better, but the client side dies a little bit every time. In the web circa '96, anyone could write a web spider or web browser, and everyone did. There was tremendous innovation both client-side and server-side. Client-side innovations included things like search engines and Google. With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. I don't think this is a net win for the world.
Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
#23This 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 cla…
Really, that doesn't feel like it should be that hard? As a developer, that sound like a nightmare. Services like these aren't just a piece of software that can be versioned, it's a system of systems, each one with certain requirements, limits, supported APIs etc. Wrangling all of that is hard enough just to support one user-facing site, much less keeping every version of the site available and working.
Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
#24The old Microsoft would respond by pushing out 2 major releases in 6 months to reduce Google Apps penetration. Ballmersoft? Notsomuch.
That's not really a good tactic, because Google could just change its policies.
Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
#25I'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 o…
As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look slightly better, but the client side dies a little bit every time. In the web circa '96, anyone could write a web spider or web browser, and everyone did. There was tremendous innovation both client-side and server-side. Client-side innovations included things like…
> I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better.
If that's all it was, then you'd be right. You can't do geolocation, local storage, audio/video, canvas/svg/webgl, etc. etc. on old browsers. It's not about making things pretty. It's about creating software that can compete with desktop alternatives.
Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
#26I'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 o…
As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look slightly better, but the client side dies a little bit every time. In the web circa '96, anyone could write a web spider or web browser, and everyone did. There was tremendous innovation both client-side and server-side. Client-side innovations included things like…
With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible.
What?
Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
#27I'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 o…
As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look slightly better, but the client side dies a little bit every time. In the web circa '96, anyone could write a web spider or web browser, and everyone did. There was tremendous innovation both client-side and server-side. Client-side innovations included things like…
With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible.
Are you serious? Have you heard of the canvas element? It allows modern browsers to do things that were only possible 2 years ago in Flash. Have you noticed how there are actual web applications, not just a collection of linked pages these days? Have you noticed how with ubiquitous JavaScript, the usability and ease of websites has improved greatly?
Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google is a big organization in the business of developing web software. Most organizations are in other businesses. If I'm running a construction company, it doesn't make sense to have IT consultants come in each time a new version of something comes out. If it works, it's best to leave it alone, modulo security fixes.
Do you feel the need to upgrade your house's plumbing system and electrical each time an innovation happens? That's how most people feel about software.
Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
#29I'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 o…
Lets put this into perspective: We are talking about Google-Apps, not Search! Marketshare is very small, and a company even considering working with GApps will not do so with IE7 anyway.
Wake me up when Google is dropping GMail support for IE7. Now that would be a story.
Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look slightly better, but the client side dies a little bit every time. In the web circa '96, anyone could write a web spider or web browser, and everyone did. There was tremendous innovation both client-side and server-side. Client-side innovations included things like…
With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. What?
I think he's saying that it makes scraping harder.
But today JS frameworks like jQuery give us the means to do anything we want javascript-related, in any browser that half-supports javascript. By deprecating IE7 they're just saying they're going to drop all of the extra hacks they had to use to keep IE7 working.
A lot of what newer browsers give us is just better rendering. You can replace a mess of tables and nested divs with things like border-radius, which means less client-side html to wade through.