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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

#111

Post by gscott »

cypherpunks wrote: post #22
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…

As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look slightly better, but the client side dies a little bit every time. In the web circa '96, anyone could write a web spider or web browser, and everyone did. There was tremendous innovation both client-side and server-side. Client-side innovations included things like…

The Les Paul guitar worked in IE6. If they can get that to work, everything else should be easy.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#112

Post by rapind »

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.

If you think that's bad, we're on Chrome 12 now... So they no longer officially support their own major release from a few months ago. I'm not sure what they're basing this on, but the major revision number doesn't seem likely.

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/07/release-early-release-often...

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#113

Post by KeyBoardG »

cypherpunks wrote: post #34
benihana wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. Are you serious? Have you heard of the canvas element? It allows modern browsers to do things that were only possible 2 years ago in Flash. Have you noticed how there are actual web applications, not just a collection of linked pages these days? Have you noticed how with ubiquitous JavaScript, the usability and ease of websites has improved great…

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…

I do see a side of what you're saying. In those older days the web was a much simpler platform so figuring out what to do and what to click was easy. This was true in Windows too as MFC was the library of choice for UI meaning a lot of the software was easy to figure out also.

Today a lot more software and websites have broken the mold and come up with some really different(not siding better or worse because both exist out there) UX patterns. There aren't standards for web UI anymore that are practiced across the board.

I do disagree with your statement that the client should dictate how a site is presented, not the server. The browser should display the content in a standards compliant way. The days of buttons looking like windows buttons in IE and Mac buttons in Safari should be a thing of the past never to return.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#114

Post by HaloZero »

A lot of people are talking about oh, what will happen with IE / Firefox support. You know what's a better way to address all these problems? (Especially for Firefox). Why not just do the auto-update process Chrome does for Firefox? I can understand why IE doesn't, but why doesn't Mozilla expend significant effort into just doing that and solving most of these issues of "outdated" firefox versions

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#115

Post by robbles »

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…

Your premise that the web is somehow less effective because you can't scrape data from pages easily doesn't make much sense to me.

Have you taken a look recently at the plethora of web APIs for just about every purpose? The modern way of collecting machine-friendly data from a server is through APIs and semantic content (RDFa, microformats, etc.).

Not through HTML / CSS / Javascript formatted pages which are made primarily for human consumption.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#116

Post by FxChiP »

grannyg00se wrote: post #40
cypherpunks wrote: post #20

This is what really irks me about Google Apps. You don't have any control over this kind of thing. They can (and do) yank the rug out from under you whenever they feel like it. A while back, they forcibly transitioned all accounts to also be normal Google accounts, with no user input. They did this before they figure out how to transition users who already had Google accounts, so now my users are split into first cla…

It also doesn't sound all that hard to update your browser.

And in general, it's not. But certain platforms (e.g. OS X on PowerPC) have been artificially restricted to the point where no new browsers are being made for them, so the latest version you can get to on them is probably outside of Google's scope of support -- and if it isn't now, it will be shortly. For instance, sure, a PowerBook G4 isn't necessarily powerful by today's standards, but surely it's powerful enough for Google Apps, yet today I don't believe it's supported in the current version of any browser because of its inherent OS X 10.4 or 10.5 cap. Sure, it's possible to switch to Linux, but I don't personally believe the user should have to.

In essence, upgrades are not as simple as you may think due to forced platform incompatibility/vendor lock-in. Forcing an upgrade like this can cost users a non-trivial sum of money on top of what you're already charging for the service!

So while I appreciate the moving into the future, I feel bad for the people whose wallets are going to feel the pain of such a move.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#117

Post by FxChiP »

tonfa wrote: post #7
michaelcampbell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory I agree with you, but at some point people are going to get tired of the upgrade forces and stop using Google apps.

Why would they be tired? Is it a pain to upgrade? (I admit I've become used to chrome upgrading in the background).

Sometimes OSes are deemed obsolete for whatever reason, and browsers -- all of them! -- simply stop developing for those OSes. This means that you're at least shelling out the cost for a new OS, which can be (1) painful (if you're using Windows or Linux in some cases) or (2) impossible (e.g. if you're using Mac OS X and Apple has decided that your hardware is "end-of-lifed" -- e.g. PowerBook G4). If you're one of the unlucky ones to be in the latter category, you actually have to shell out enough money for at least some upgraded hardware (perhaps in addition to the OS), or possibly a brand new (or newer but still used) computer, which will likely be a lot more painful than just shelling out for the OS.

The key point is that Google Apps are tied to browser versions, and browser versions are tied to OS versions, and OS versions aren't exactly consistent in their support or end-user coverage. Users who figured their current setup works well enough for now, and who for many years haven't had any reason to upgrade will now be forced to if they want to make use of those Google Apps -- or, they can take the much less costly route and simply not use Google Apps, or deal with "simple HTML mode" or whatever.

The worst part about this that irritates me most, though, is that many of these systems simply don't have anything wrong with them except that someone, somewhere, arbitrarily decided they were "too old". So perfectly functional pieces of equipment now lack functionality because enough people have arbitrarily decided that they "don't have" that functionality anymore, even where it might actually be possible.

On the plus side, it does mean that no one has to support old browsers' quirky and always-varied interpretations of the same chunk of code...

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#119

Post by prodigal_erik »

icebraining wrote: post #105
cypherpunks wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More and more content is being taken entirely off the open web and siloed behind a server that talks an unstable proprietary protocol, with exactly one blob of javascript in existence that knows how to tunnel requests over HTTP to access shreds of that content and cram them into an utterly non-semantic DOM. We are hurtling backwards into the client-server hell the web had saved us from.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#120

Post by riobard »

HaloZero wrote: post #114

A lot of people are talking about oh, what will happen with IE / Firefox support. You know what's a better way to address all these problems? (Especially for Firefox). Why not just do the auto-update process Chrome does for Firefox? I can understand why IE doesn't, but why doesn't Mozilla expend significant effort into just doing that and solving most of these issues of "outdated" firefox versions

Mozilla is gonna do frequent updates like Chrome starting from Firefox 5.
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