Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 144 posts

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#91

Post by pak »

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.

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

Yes, and I was dissecting why you may have found it useful, because the same principle applies to hundreds of other situations that you may not have recognized.

> 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

Questionable. About the only key shortcuts you can rely on are the ones that will work in your browser too. Alt-F4 will close your browser--that's what you wanted, right? Cut/copy/paste, print, etc. all work there as well...

> the menu structure is roughly the same too

Ha, you mean the invisible menus on Explorer and IE>8, the mega "office button" menu in Office 2007, the delightfully inconsistent menu bars in WMP>9...

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#92

Post by edanm »

melling wrote: post #37
eiji wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This includes Gmail.

That's misleading. Google Apps has Google in it, but (unless I missed something) GMail as a seperate product is not what is talked about here.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#93

Post by ori_b »

yock wrote: post #82
cypherpunks wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't. Why would I want to upgrade my fixtures twice a year if they're working and look fine? I'd be happy to keep the same set for 20 years, myself.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#95

Post by magicalist »

edanm wrote: post #92
melling wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This includes Gmail.

That's misleading. Google Apps has Google in it, but (unless I missed something) GMail as a seperate product is not what is talked about here.

according to this help doc (which points to the original blog post announcement), they're moving gmail to this same support system:

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#96

Post by dreamdu5t »

cypherpunks wrote: post #44
mnutt wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neste…

Not just scraping. Any sort of non-human parsing of web pages. Look at the 1990s literature on web agents for lots of applications.

Well yeah, the web as a collection of interlinked information is dead. It's now television 2.0 with most innovation going to marketing.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#97

Post by magicalist »

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.

"not supported" and "not working" are different things. I can't think of any breaking changes between 3.6 and 4 outside of the extension system.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#98

Post by abraham »

bpeebles wrote: post #32
belthesar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go with the fact that unless you NEVER restart your browser, the likelihood is that you are one or two minor versions behind the latest Chrome code at worst. With Chrome's automagical update system, most users barely notice when an update comes down the pike.

True... however, a moderately large website I have access to analytics has about 5% of Chrome users using something older than 11. It's possible to install Chrome without enabling the auto updates, so exactly which versions of Chrome they still support is somewhat useful information, I guess. More likely, since the versions of FFx, IE, and Safari they support are the versions of another company's product--unlike thei…

> exactly which versions of Chrome they still support is somewhat useful information

The current stable release of Chrome the the version before it.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#99

Post by abraham »

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…

When the electrical grid connecting to your house get updated and no longer supports your installed system you upgrade as well or you don't get electricity.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#100

Post by cypherpunks »

Groxx wrote: post #73
cypherpunks wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, wh…

I'd love to see that extension. If you write it, I will use it. I use Chrome too, so it should work here.

As to what should and shouldn't be part of the browser -- the way to figure that out is experimentation and competition. When you make technologies and standards simple and easy, people will make independent implementations and try things. The vast majority will be dumb, but some (often unanticipated ones) will turn out to be useful, clever, or brilliant. That's how the technology improves.

When you make standards big and cumbersome, progress stops.

Post reply on HN