Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps • Hacker News Board

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#61

Post by codehalo » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:01 PM UTC

pak wrote: post #54

cypherpunks wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#62

Post by rimantas » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:02 PM UTC

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 the thing we call "web application" hardly existed. If web page "has nothing except JavaScript" (e.g. GMail) is probably is web app and indexing it makes little sense anyway. If someone misuses JS on content site, that's another story. And your comment about innovation makes no sense at all. Capabilities of modern browsers (Canvas, geolocation, local storage, offline apps, etc.) offer more opportunities for innovation than "old web" could even imagine.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#63

Post by codehalo » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:04 PM UTC

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…

Did you post this using the lynx browser?

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#64

Post by emilsedgh » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:04 PM UTC

BCM43 wrote: post #8

melling wrote: 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.

Debian Stable is for servers. For desktop, obviously you want Debian Testing or Unstable.

Of course its a matter of choice, but if you stick to Debian Stable for your desktop, such issues are to be expected.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#65

Post by jm4 » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:06 PM UTC

cypherpunks wrote: post #38

stanleydrew wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense is Google a "client-side innovation"?

The Google Spider grabs pages from other servers. That's a web client. It's a web client that was easy to write when Google was started, but is almost impossible to write today. If search engines hadn't been invented 20 years ago, they'd be impossible to invent today. The only reason they still work is tremendous work on Google's end to have its spider be able to spider complex AJAXy pages, and that content creators…

It is not harder or easier. It is just different than it used to be. Things that used to be hard are easy now. Problems that didn't exist 10 years ago exist today. I develop a spider.

For the most part, the bulk of the web's content is as easily accessible as it was years ago. You make a request and you get a blob of HTML back. If you have special requirements and need to get into all the nooks and crannies you create a DOM implementation and embed a JavaScript engine. Then you parse the page into a DOM and start firing off events. There are quality open source JavaScript engines available. JavaScript and AJAX are a breeze.

Flash is a different story. If you have any requirement to follow links or process content in a Flash movie (you'd be surprised how many sites still have Flash nav) you pretty much have to write your own runtime. Unless you are big enough to have Adobe do it for you.

Depending on what you are doing with the data that your spider collects, chances are writing a spider is far easier than writing a browser. There are at least 4 widely used browser engines and plenty more toy browsers floating around.

I can guarantee that writing a spider that can deal with AJAX is not the biggest challenge of developing a search engine. Scaling it, fighting SPAM, understanding the content, indexing and then being able to provide quick lookups are much, much harder.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#66

Post by antimatter15 » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:06 PM UTC

mey wrote: post #55

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?

Google stops supporting anything below the current shipping version. I think Chrome 12 is the shipping stable version, and Dev is at 14, so in chrome time, version 10 is archaic. But Chrome has the automatic auto-update feature which makes something like 90% of installations upgrade to the latest release within a week of its publication, so versions aren't nearly as much of an issue.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#67

Post by jtwb » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:11 PM UTC

pizzaburger wrote: post #21

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.

"Current and previous major releases" is a peaceful approach. There is no discretion involved - at no point was an active decision made to cut off your IE 7 users.

Plus, your FF 4 users will know exactly when FF support will be dropped - the day FF 6 is released. Simple.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#68

Post by tomjen3 » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:15 PM UTC

eddieplan9 wrote: post #58

sixcorners wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They do when they don't have a choice (which is also mostly the only way you can get most people to change at all).

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#69

Post by cypherpunks » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:15 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #57

cypherpunks wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

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

Bookmarks in books work okay. You move them. Book marks in browsers don't. You have to remove the old one, add the new one, and the overall process is too cumbersome to be useful for the application I mentioned.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#70

Post by notatoad » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:17 PM UTC

mey wrote: post #55

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?

is it even possible to not be running the latest version of chrome? who's still running chrome 10?

and despite a lack of official support, there aren't any huge changes between these versions so things will probably still work fine. it just means they aren't testing for it.