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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

#71

Post by cypherpunks »

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…

Did you read what I wrote? I mentioned Google Maps as one of the two places I found AJAX useful.

The applications on my mom's PC do have much better UI standardization than the web does. Microsoft releases UI guidelines. alt-f4 does the same thing in every application I've used, and the menu structure is roughly the same too. Apple is even better.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#72

Post by ggchappell »

Yes, dropping support for IE 7 is fine. But the recently weird-ified FF release schedule is going to make this new Google Apps policy have strange results.

FF 4 was released 3 months ago. It's just now looking confidence-inspiring enough that I'm considering upgrading to it on my Mac this week. But now Google is going to drop support for it when FF 6 is released in a couple of months???

Another issue: if I'm not mistaken, the fact that Ubuntu releases stick with a particular browser version, means that the LTS releases (and 10.04 in particular) will stay with a version of FF long after Google Apps has stopped supporting it.

Both of these strike me as serious problems. Perhaps the Google Apps people have not really thought through the ramifications of this policy?

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#73

Post by Groxx »

cypherpunks wrote: post #69
Groxx wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's an "edit" option as well.

As to the auto-updating bookmarks, would it resolve the issue if I made an extension to do that for you? I can see the use, honestly, and I like it. (seriously, I'm offering, and I'd probably use it myself. It'd be an interesting project. Even if it doesn't resolve the issue - we might just fundamentally disagree here, I'm OK with that.)

But why should that be part of the browser, when modern browsers allow you to do damn near anything by simply leveraging it? Why should we rely on browser makers to tell us what's possible, when we can do it ourselves, because of the changes in the past 15 years?

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#76

Post by cypherpunks »

stanleydrew wrote: post #42
cypherpunks wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed I see now what you mean.

I'm glad. Thank you for taking the time to read and understand. Hacker News is starting to go down the decline that hit reddit 2 years ago, where people don't bother to try to understand different viewpoints, and just downvote anything they don't agree with. It's nice to see good people still on here...

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#77

Post by notatoad »

hvs wrote: post #51
grannyg00se wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they have slow update paths because they can get away with slow update paths. if web developers stop catering to lazy IT departments, maybe they won't be so slow anymore.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#78

Post by qjz »

emilsedgh wrote: post #64
BCM43 wrote: 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.

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.

Sorry, that's just wrong. Stable means stable, be it server or desktop. Testing and Unstable are aptly named by Debian, and that's where you should expect issues to arise.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#79

Post by ghshephard »

ggchappell wrote: post #72

Yes, dropping support for IE 7 is fine. But the recently weird-ified FF release schedule is going to make this new Google Apps policy have strange results. FF 4 was released 3 months ago. It's just now looking confidence-inspiring enough that I'm considering upgrading to it on my Mac this week. But now Google is going to drop support for it when FF 6 is released in a couple of months??? Another issue: if I'm not mist…

I think we can be confident that Google will "Do the right thing" - they aren't blindly following a "Drop Support for versionX when versionCurrent = versionX+2"

I'm reasonably certain by that by "Two Major Versions" they are referring to "Versions that alter how the platform interacts with the Web." - So, as long as FF 5 and FF 6 behave reasonably similarly, they'll be treated as the same major version, and Google will support FF4 and FF5/6.

Or, it may be the case, after some review, that FF4/FF5/FF6 will all be treated as the same major version, and official support on August, 2011 will be for FF3.6 and FF4/5/6. Time will tell.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#80

Post by technogeek00 »

To me it seems Microsoft needs to take a leaf from Google's book and incorporate the automagical browser updating. IE, sadly, has always controlled the browser market because if comes prepackaged and most users are novice and oblivious to updating and system requirements. Sure people will say they are copying Google, but in doing this, they might finally be able to keep up with web standards as they are released instead of supporting new standards 2 years after everyone else does creating this entire version fiasco to begin with.
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