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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

#81

Post by ggchappell »

ghshephard wrote: post #79
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 wi…

> I think we can be confident that Google will "Do the right thing"'

Well, hopefully. But they've officially announced the dropping of support, so I have to wonder.

> I'm reasonably certain by that by "Two Major Versions" they are referring to "Versions that alter how the platform interacts with the Web."

That might be. But that makes me wonder about FF. Apparently the changes from 3.5 to 3.6 are more significant than those from 4 to 6. What's the deal with that?

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#82

Post by yock »

cypherpunks wrote: post #28
yock wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 innovatio…

A web browser isn't akin to plumbing, rather it would be closer to a fixture. And I do understand why folks would want to update their fixtures often.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#83

Post by _delirium »

technogeek00 wrote: post #80

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 inst…

Google is only really able to do it because nobody is depending too much on stuff built on top of the browser (yet, anyway). When you've built whole internal apps on top of a browser, as many companies have built on IE, frequent upgrades that change anything can be problematic. Firefox is in an interesting in-between position, where they encourage frequent upgrades, but users who use a lot of add-ons are reluctant to upgrade too often, because upgrades often break add-ons.

Of course, it's not a problem if every upgrade is backwards-compatible with every add-on and intranet app, but that's tough to pull off.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#85

Post by loire280 »

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.

Banks and financial institutions are subject to extensive document retention and security regulations -- using Google Docs is out of the question. Of course, that is one of the primary reasons why their upgrade paths are so slow.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#86

Post by tomkarlo »

notatoad wrote: post #77
hvs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have slow update paths because they've spent a lot of money on in-house middleware that they don't feel a need to update, and sometimes those systems don't work so hot on the new browser. Faced with a choice between updating old middleware and not updating the browser, they choose to wait on updating the browser. The longer they do that, the more work the middleware needs to be "up to date", and the worse the problem becomes. Definitely not isolated to banks.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#87

Post by VBprogrammer »

jm4 wrote: post #65
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…

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 creat…

I recently looked through the Google developer guidelines and they still recommend not changing the page contents significantly using Javascript. Also, the !# in modern AJAX apps is there to avoid having to run the Javascript in order to crawl the content. Do Google actually do that much with the Javascript on a page even today?

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#88

Post by jgroome »

dstein wrote: post #59
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.

So Google should aspire to be more like Microsoft? :/

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#89

Post by bad_user »

cypherpunks wrote: post #71
pak wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

     Microsoft releases UI guidelines
Microsoft and UI guidelines in the same sentence, something doesn't compile - I would be happy if they used their own guidelines though.

     the menu structure is roughly the same too
Too bad it is getting reinvented; it happened in Office 2010 and it will happen again as people are getting tired of File -> Save; and yet again when touch screens on laptops will become the norm.

So I'm sorry for your mom, but unless she never upgrades, then she's going to have to learn new things.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#90

Post by chrisjsmith »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #19
chrisjsmith wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You choose Google Apps. Google Apps should not choose you.
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