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Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

#101

Post by nfoz »

1971genocide wrote: post #60
millstone wrote: post #31

Riiiight. "Old browsers." Which "old version" of Chrome do you think is affected? Google has already proven their willingness to degrade their search experience for non-Chrome browsers, by splashing a Chrome banner ad on the Google search home page[1]. This is about capturing more marketshare for Chrome, pure and simple. Eventually "old browsers" will be replaced by "browsers we don't care to support" will be replace…

Google has done amazing stuff for the web, so has microsoft, IBM,etc before it. The trick is to not give any one company a lot of power and diversify the power among many corporations etc. Google is still the most innovative company out there but lets hope we realize the time when they will need to step-aside and let other more innovative companies take its place.

Genuinely curious, what "amazing stuff" have Microsoft and IBM done for the web?

Re: Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

#102

Post by totalrobe »

userbinator wrote: post #4

Google has started showing old versions of its search page to people using out-of-date versions of some web browsers. On the other hand, many of the people using older versions of browsers would probably be the same ones who don't like the changes Google's made to its pages. As someone who regularly uses various browsers (including text-based), I have a very strong opinion on this: I've noticed the "you must use brow…

Browser updates can have major effects on enterprise level webapp behavior. It's a major headache to maintain support for n browser versions for something that doesn't add functionality to the application.

We have to re-certify our app with each major browser release and at the same time make sure we're still functioning with older versions, and make sure that older branches of our app is patched and customers are aware of limitations.

Re: Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

#103

Post by acdha »

DanBC wrote: post #64
vonklaus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while i respect that you personally are constrained in this respect, support for XP has ended. Chronologically, google inc was founded ~3 years before XP was released and it wasn't mainstream on inception. So the point being when XP was released like 13 years ago, it enjoyed mass audience. Now there have been several iterations of windows and according to mores law 10 years forward see more innovation than the preced…

I would fault my phone company if I could no longer make and recieve phone calls and send and receive SMS text messages. And it's not just about stuff not working on simple machines - many sites are awful to use on recent smart phones and recent OSs because they have only been tested on local networks on development machines. No one has tested them on normal machines.

> I would fault my phone company if I could no longer make and recieve phone calls and send and receive SMS text messages.

We went through this when cell networks decommissioned analog service and again when the early digital stuff was phased out. It turned out not to be such a big deal – once the phone company hit you with a higher bill to support the old equipment, almost everyone quickly decided learning how to use a new phone wasn't so bad.

This is similar: companies are hoping that the rest of us will subsidize their IT decisions with increased development and support costs. The difference is that most places lack a mechanism to pass along those costs so they're rarely confronted with a cost comparison.

Re: Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

#104

Post by WorldWideWayne »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #32
userbinator wrote: post #4

Google has started showing old versions of its search page to people using out-of-date versions of some web browsers. On the other hand, many of the people using older versions of browsers would probably be the same ones who don't like the changes Google's made to its pages. As someone who regularly uses various browsers (including text-based), I have a very strong opinion on this: I've noticed the "you must use brow…

> Users should be free to use whatever browser they want, on whatever hardware they want, They are. > with the understanding that some sites may use features their browsers don't support. Yep. > Most sites on the Internet are still primarily sources of information, and it's rather disconcerting to see "appification" turning easily accessible pages containing text and images into complex behemoths that only work in th…

>> Users should be free to use whatever browser they want...

> They are.

Users are free to access sites that don't work on their browser? Sounds like a very desirable freedom to have...

>> Most sites on the Internet...

> That's covered by the second half of the first quoted sentence.

Incorrect. The first half of the sentence that you quoted said "Most sites..." not Google's site.

>> there's a marginalising, discriminatory element to it that I just can't agree with.

> So, only users get to use new tech and developers are stuck with using whatever works on the oldest stuff?

Sure - Developers can do whatever they want, but isn't everybody free to complain about it?

How would you feel if tomorrow most sites (including Google) started employing some type of extremely annoying DRM and you couldn't access those sites at all without buying a completely new phone, computer, laptop and software for yourself and your whole entire company.

Let me guess - you'll say "they're free to do that". Great. That's a very productive answer. Do you think anyone would be complaining about it? Probably lot's of people. So, what's the point of saying that "everybody's free to do whatever they want" other than to state the painfully obvious? Yes, yes, yes - all things being equal, people are free to do wtf they want. Yay!

Re: Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

#105

Post by WorldWideWayne »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #33
icantthinkofone wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've noticed the "you must use browser X, Y, or Z" trend become more prevalent over the years..." I believe what you are actually seeing is the opposite of "Don't use IE". Instead they are saying "Use anything but IE" (best viewed in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera). And that's good advice.

I've adopted the "I don't care if you use IE" mentality. I'm on OS X - if a browser doesn't run there, to hell with them. I'm not wasting the money to buy an OS I can't stand just to test a browser. I'm also not wasting time having to reinstall a VM every 30 days for the same reason. When MS makes it painless to run IE on a Mac, then I'll actively test against it. I might not try to actively break it, but I'm not goi…

At least all you'd have to do is "buy an OS". I'd have to buy a whole computer to use an OS that I can't stand in order to test stuff on a Mac.

(But that's really living in the past. These days we have BrowserStack.)

Re: Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

#106

Post by xg15 »

toxican wrote: post #78
dmitri145 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As web dev, I am aware of a pain to work with old browsers. However, as user/customer, I perfectly feel for people who have better things to do with their lives, then download, upgrade, update, sometimes spending hours, breaking things, spending more hours to repair them, and so on. In the ideal world, upgrading should be easy and fast, and provide an easy reverse if the user is not happy. As we know, this is not the…

In what way isn't it easy/fast now? Upgrading from something like IE7 is as easy and downloading/installing and you're done. It'll hold your hand through carrying over your data from the old browser and even ask if you want it to be the new default. Then updates from there are done automatically in the background without any user input.

But how about the part where you can also reverse the update easily because you don't like the UI changes or an important extension broke?

Re: Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

#107

Post by WorldWideWayne »

icantthinkofone wrote: post #87
vonklaus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tbh the guys who are building the new IE did a reddit AMA a week or so ago. The new IE seems really great and those guys seem smart and receptive to the needs of web-devs and users. The problem, which google is trying to address, is that I doubt the majority share of computers running ie are running the newest most updated version. However, ceterus paribas, your point is well taken.

The new IE is better than the old IE but being better than crap is still crap. IE can't hold a candle to the other browsers despite what Microsoft tells you. Known, provable, verifiable.

In the past IE beat the pants off of Netscape and basically invented "Web 2.0" with Microsoft's introduction of XMLHttpRequest. Nowadays IE starts faster and uses less memory than Chrome and has just as much CSS compliance. There are few parts of the HTML5 "standard" that IE doesn't supports.

So, what exactly are you talking about? What does "hold a candle" to mean to you?

Here are some charts of IE not holding a candle to other browsers - http://blog.mid.as/2013/11/13/best-web-browser-internet-expl...

Maybe you can provide some of your own links to explain just what it is that you're talking about because I don't think anyone has a clue.

Re: Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

#109

Post by mirkules »

acdha wrote: post #93
marrs wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that radmuzom's fault? And more to the point, why should the web be inaccessible to someone a decade behind?

It's not the users’ fault but if nothing else his IT department is being recklessly negligent by choosing to block security updates.

Whatever the IT policy is is not really relevant. There is a big difference between ending or not providing support for older browsers (passively), and actively deciding to limit functionality solely on the basis of having an outdated browser.

Maybe the new search page uses features only found in the newest browsers. But since we have little details to go on (apart from the employee's canned response of "we are constantly updating functionality"), I'm skeptical that in fact they did this just for the sake of doing it "for the users' own good". That is wrong, imho

Re: Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

#110

Post by userbinator »

tracker1 wrote: post #24
userbinator wrote: post #4

Google has started showing old versions of its search page to people using out-of-date versions of some web browsers. On the other hand, many of the people using older versions of browsers would probably be the same ones who don't like the changes Google's made to its pages. As someone who regularly uses various browsers (including text-based), I have a very strong opinion on this: I've noticed the "you must use brow…

I've been doing web application development since the mid-90's... If you think browser discrimination is new, so are you. NN4 and IE4 were so different from each other it wasn't funny. And by the time IE6 was released it was a godsend. Four years later, it was crap... by the time MS finally picked up development there was far better. Just the same, pushing to abandon anything before IE9 is a hard sell... but when you…

NN4 and IE4 were so different from each other it wasn't funny.

On the other hand, those differences are likely to be mostly cosmetic - this was a time when JavaScript was very little-used and pages were still mostly static with little in the way of style, so they were still quite usable across browsers despite looking different.

Now that pages are more "appified" there is far more than can break, because of the larger dependence on JavaScript and CSS.

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