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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

#121

Post by jackvalentine »

rapind wrote: post #112
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...

You'll note that in the link it just says Chrome without a version number. They'll support their own browser differently. Unfair? Some might think it, but considering Chrome's success in forcing version upgrades on people it will work fine.

I think people are putting too much/too little thought in to this version number thing. With Firefox's six-weekly release schedule now they'll define a major release differently from the version number.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#122

Post by cypherpunks »

robbles wrote: post #115
cypherpunks wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pri…

Which only works for pre-intended uses, or standards that have substantial market share.

Again, read the literature on agents from the nineties, and see how diverse a technology tree was killed....

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#123

Post by cypherpunks »

rimantas wrote: post #62
cypherpunks wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

15 years ago the thing we call "web application" hardly existed. If web page "has nothing except JavaScript" (e.g. GMail) is probably is web app and indexing it makes little sense anyway. If someone misuses JS on content site, that's another story. And your comment about innovation makes no sense at all. Capabilities of modern browsers (Canvas, geolocation, local storage, offline apps, etc.) offer more opportunities…

I am aware of the current opportunities.

I think you (and most people here) underestimate what the "old web" could imagine, though. We had all sort of ideas for agents that would go out and grab and analyze data for us in all sorts of clever and interesting ways. Search engines got built, as did one or two other things, and then the web just got too complex.

Hell, even I had a simple app that went out and grabbed all my favorite comics and showed them to me, nicely formatted, and without ads.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#124

Post by eropple »

maratd wrote: post #25
cypherpunks wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. If that's all it was, then you'd be right. You can't do geolocation, local storage, audio/video, canvas/svg/webgl, etc. etc. on old browsers. It's not about making things pretty. It's about creating software that can compete with desktop alternatives.

Unspoken assumption: that competing with desktop alternatives is good or desired.

Personally, I can't think of a single desktop application that I use that is better done in a browser with the possible exception of Google Maps, and I say "possible" because I haven't seen a desktop contender.

I use GMail's web interface solely because I can't stand any of the Mac clients (at work) and Outlook isn't available on Linux (which a couple of my PCs at home run). It is cross-platform, which is a plus; it is painfully ugly and slower than a desktop alternative, which is an overwhelming minus.

I greatly prefer my web browser to be for browsing the web. While I'm all for standards in HTML/CSS/JS, I find the "web browser as your OS!" crap to be disheartening. I like things that work, and for the most part, web applications don't.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#125

Post by eropple »

emilsedgh wrote: post #101
qjz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given how often Ubuntu breaks hilariously on dist-upgrades, yes, I would say they are unstable. Though for slightly different reasons than the ones the grandparent poster mentioned.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#126

Post by prodigal_erik »

rimantas wrote: post #62
cypherpunks wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

15 years ago the thing we call "web application" hardly existed. If web page "has nothing except JavaScript" (e.g. GMail) is probably is web app and indexing it makes little sense anyway. If someone misuses JS on content site, that's another story. And your comment about innovation makes no sense at all. Capabilities of modern browsers (Canvas, geolocation, local storage, offline apps, etc.) offer more opportunities…

Gmail's HTML view works fine in Links. That team has been showing competence and diligence that's increasingly rare, and I wish people wouldn't tar them with the same brush as the clowns who write js-only crap.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#127

Post by IChrisI »

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.

If you want to move a bookmark to a different place on a blog / content site, it is probably because you want to read new entries. RSS does this fairly well.

If you want to read through a site's archives, what I do is keep it open in a tab. It is restored when I reopen my browser, saved if I reboot, etc. It's not as handy as a bookmark, but it comes close.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#128

Post by sid0 »

FxChiP wrote: post #116
grannyg00se wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Didn't you also bring that upon yourself by buying a product from that particular vendor (Apple) as opposed to any other? Upgrade treadmills and forced obsolescence are always a risk with software, and users need to learn to account for it.

I recently acquired a Macbook Pro from work, but I'm using Windows 7 on it full-time. I'm far too wary of being forced to upgrade when Apple stops providing security updates to the version of OS X currently installed on it.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#129

Post by santa_boy »

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…

Agree! Many thanks Google! It is about time this happened. Let Microsoft worry about Skype while the rest of us try to make the WWW more user and developer friendly.

Re: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

#130

Post by robin_reala »

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…

Dropping support ≠ stops working. Dropping support means that if you go to them with a support query their support staff are legitimately allowed to say “use a newer browser”.
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