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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

#101

Post by emilsedgh »

qjz wrote: post #78
emilsedgh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thats not quite right. Being stable is subjective. Ubuntu and a TON of distro's are based on Debian Unstable. Does that mean they are unstable because of that?

Debian unstable and testing are a bit more unstable, of course, but they are still good enough for desktop.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#102

Post by JoshTriplett »

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.

We actually built a site to solve that problem. If you have a series of pages (blog, comic, book, etc) and want to mark your place in them with a bookmark that moves as you read, try Serialist (https://serialist.net/).

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#103

Post by methodin »

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…

I don't really quite get what point you are making here. Are you saying that the innovation today owes more to the innovation of the mid-nineties? Are you saying that any innovation now with respect to AJAX and JS does not make your life better in any way?

Seemingly you argument could be made for cars "15 years ago cars were easy to fix and understand. Now they are not, so wake me up when they are like the cars of the mid-nineties."

JS/Ajax help programmers tremendously. Helps speed. Helps functionality.

To view these things through the lense of "I can't write a crawler for them" is a pretty limited view of what today's technology offers.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#104

Post by TeHCrAzY »

chrisjsmith wrote: post #90
JoshTriplett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Why shouldn't they? It seems perfectly reasonable to exclude customers if they are unprofitable: in this case, it may be that google is willing to take a hit in the short term, with the view to allowing them to strongly innovate in the future.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#105

Post by icebraining »

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.

Are you kidding? The semantic web and using more metadata is making it easier than ever. Nowadays in many cases not only you have the content, as it is tagged with microformats or RDFa.

Try looking at Freebase or DBpedia and tell me where did you have such a huge amount of easily parsable, semantic content in the 90s.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#106

Post by whatusername »

abraham wrote: post #99
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…

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.

Sure. But that happens maybe every 20/30 years. Not every 6-12 months.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#107

Post by nitrogen »

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…

At the time, we were talking about developing all sorts of agents. Things that would shop for you. Things that would find parts for you. Thinks that would remember what web sites you visited, and let you search them. Things that would track where in a long set of pages you were (blog, comic, etc.), and let you keep reading from there.

The drive toward semantic markup in HTML5 is supposed to help the web get back to those original ideals. Over time, we'll increasingly expect web developers to conform to a subset of possible HTML arrangements, much like book publishers conform to a subset of the possible random arrangements and orientations of letters on a page (odd poetry excepted).

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#108

Post by nitrogen »

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 seem to recall reading that Ubuntu changed its browser policy on LTS releases to upgrade to the next stable version of Firefox when Mozilla stops releasing security updates for the version used by the LTS release.

This is the best reference I could find with a 30-second search (non-authoritative): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1551527

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#109

Post by politician »

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.

No, I think they're doing the right thing here. A firm hand on the backs of people who would otherwise never upgrade, not a punch in the face. Frankly, I'd be willing to bet there are plenty of people in Redmond that secretly approve this move. Microsoft has to play the role of stabilizer for their enterprise customers (so therefore updates are optional), but I'm certain that they wish their home users could play with the "new fast native Internet."

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#110

Post by ggchappell »

nitrogen wrote: post #108
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 seem to recall reading that Ubuntu changed its browser policy on LTS releases to upgrade to the next stable version of Firefox when Mozilla stops releasing security updates for the version used by the LTS release. This is the best reference I could find with a 30-second search (non-authoritative): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1551527

Yes, it looks like they might be doing something sensible there. Thanks for the link.
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