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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

#51

Post by hvs »

grannyg00se wrote: post #40
cypherpunks wrote: post #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 cla…

It also doesn't sound all that hard to update your browser.

Depends on where you work. Banks and financial institutions have notoriously slow upgrade paths in IT.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#53

Post by jarrett »

cypherpunks wrote: post #22
jarrett wrote: post #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 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 echo the comments others have made about the wide range of improvements offered by modern browsers. But even putting that aside, the rendering capabilities you refer to make a bigger difference to web users than you might think.

You say "I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better." But--no disrespect--you probably only feel that way because you're already benefitting from the huge amounts of effort invested in supporting multiple, incompatible browsers. The web looks OK for you now because, without you noticing it, web developers have slaved to make it look OK for your unique combination of OS and browser.

It may seem like that's just a cost we web developers have to bear, with little effect on you. But that's not so. The fact that we have to spend time supporting old browsers increases the cost of everything that's created on the web. And when innovation is more expensive, it happens more slowly. The costs imposed on our industry by older browsers do effect ordinary web users, because those costs translate into a slower pace of innovation.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#54

Post by pak »

cypherpunks wrote: post #34
benihana wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 great…

No. I haven't. I've noticed maybe 1 or 2 web apps I want to use (Google Docs and Google Maps). Beyond that, I don't see anything that couldn't be delivered more effectively without JavaScript that I want or need. Usability is not up. Each web site has its own, custom, non-standard user interface. I could teach my mom to use the web circa '96. I cannot teach her to use it today. It's too damn complex. Usability would…

A big part of usability is not sitting around waiting for entire pages to reload every time you interact with them. AJAX has done great things for users by minimizing this delay. You wouldn't like Google Maps as much if you had to click an arrow and wait for a page refresh for the map to move, like MapQuest circa 2003.

Yes, the proliferation of web apps has created a diversity of user interface paradigms. Some would say this is a good thing, however, since the web has spurred all kinds of new UI philosophies, and the fact that JavaScript and HTML isn't compiled allows people to examine and re-work others' code, so good ideas spread very quickly. I for one don't intend on waiting for the HTML5 group to invent every new that I could conceivably need, and then wait some more for browser vendors to implement them all consistently. With JavaScript, you can currently build and deploy just about any kind of 2D client-side interaction imaginable.

In short, the vast majority of users on the internet probably have a different idea of usability than yours, and the numbers tell the rest of that story. You only need to look at the gross casserole of UI paradigms within the applications installed on your mom's PC to see how much users really care about UI standardization.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#55

Post by mey »

Does this mean if I'm running Google Chrome 10 I won't work with Google Apps?

I notice there is a lack of effective major version numbering in Google. When does Google stop supporting it's own browser?

It'd also be interesting to see what they intend to do about mobile browsers. How long will an old OpenWave XHTML browser be supported? How long will an Android 1.5 browser?

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#56

Post by trafficlight »

cypherpunks wrote: post #31
glhaynes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. What?

15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine. Myself. 1 person. In a few weeks (modulo bandwidth and server farm). I write a program that grabs a web page, and reads out keywords. Today, if I grab a web page, quite often, that web page has nothing except for JavaScript code. That code grabs the actual content from the server, lays it out, and animates it. To write a web search engine, I need to write a comp…

You're essentially saying we should halt all progress in web design because it will make some programming things harder for you as an individual.

That's not what the web is and that is not the web environment that I want.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#57

Post by Groxx »

cypherpunks wrote: post #31
glhaynes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. What?

15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine. Myself. 1 person. In a few weeks (modulo bandwidth and server farm). I write a program that grabs a web page, and reads out keywords. Today, if I grab a web page, quite often, that web page has nothing except for JavaScript code. That code grabs the actual content from the server, lays it out, and animates it. To write a web search engine, I need to write a comp…

>15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine.

No, 15 years ago you could reasonably write a search engine for 15 years ago. It would suck by today's standards.

You want to handle Javascript? Easy! There are plenty of tools to choose from now. Run a browser as your crawler, visit the sites, and read the generated source instead of the static source. Shove that into your 15-years-ago search engine, and there's no difference.

>Things that would track where in a long set of pages you were

You mean bookmarks? Add a scroll %, assuming they're not nice enough to use anchor tags / IDs meaningfully, and you're golden.

>Writing anything that can reasonably see and parse web pages...

has become a community effort, instead of a bunch of isolated silos where people reinvented the wheel out of necessity.

The resources required aren't so large just because it's so much more complex, it's large because it's so much faster, and you won't survive if you can't compete. How long did we languish with crappy Javascript engines? How much would you need to know to actively compete in that section alone now? It's easy to make a slow-but-functional browser, and if you looked around you'd see some people doing just that. Making a fast-and-resilient one is as hard as making a fast-and-resilient anything, especially where human input (ie, HTML) is expected to be consumed.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#58

Post by eddieplan9 »

sixcorners wrote: post #48
asomiv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't, many businesses rely on Microsoft's browser lockdown support. For example strict IE from browsing through the local disk or restricting settings from being modified. Firefox and Chrome have virtually no lockdown support.

Can't you secure everything on the operating system level?

I am sorry, but adapting to a vendor is not how IT departments run (especially when a vendor aims to replace your IT departments).

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#59

Post by dstein »

jarrett wrote: post #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 o…

I think they should go further. A more Microsoft-esque thing to do would be if someone is using IE to require the use of Chrome Frame.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#60

Post by [deleted] »

cypherpunks wrote: post #34
benihana wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 great…

No. I haven't. I've noticed maybe 1 or 2 web apps I want to use (Google Docs and Google Maps). Beyond that, I don't see anything that couldn't be delivered more effectively without JavaScript that I want or need. Usability is not up. Each web site has its own, custom, non-standard user interface. I could teach my mom to use the web circa '96. I cannot teach her to use it today. It's too damn complex. Usability would…

[deleted]
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