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Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
- melling 15y agoDo 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.
- magicalist 15y agoOr Firefox 4 when Firefox 6 is released in August? I'm curious about this too. Of course, "not supported" isn't the same as "not working". For Firefox (just like Chrome), I doubt there will be changes breaking enough to cause a problem. The real question is if they'll start using features (e.g. canvas or newer selectors) not available in those earlier browsers for major functionality in their apps.
- bpeebles 15y agoAnd once again, they list specific version numbers for IE, Firefox, and Safari, but just say "Chrome" for Chrome, even though later it groups Chrome with the rest of the two most recent. I guess it's because they don't know for sure what versions of Chrome will be the two most recent released, but it's still kind of funny.
- belthesar 15y agoI'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.
- bpeebles 15y agoTrue... 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 their own--they feel like they have to be more upfront.
- abraham 15y ago> exactly which versions of Chrome they still support is somewhat useful information The current stable release of Chrome the the version before it.
- nextparadigms 15y agoThat's because transitioning users from an older version of IE to a newer one can take years, while I think they said that when they upgrade Chrome, it takes about 10 days to get 99% of the users on the newer version.
- michaelcampbell 15y agoIn theory I agree with you, but at some point people are going to get tired of the upgrade forces and stop using Google apps.
- tonfa 15y agoWhy would they be tired? Is it a pain to upgrade? (I admit I've become used to chrome upgrading in the background).
- ori_b 15y agoIt is if you're in a large organization, or you want to make sure thngs don't break before you release them to your users.
- yock 15y agoThe 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.
- cypherpunks 15y agoGoogle 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 innovation happens? That's how most people feel about software.
- yock 15y agoA 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.
- BCM43 15y agoFirefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? This would cause problems for anyone on Debian squeeze.
- chrisjsmith 15y agoWe're using IceWeasel which will, as per Debian's usual policy, still be supported with security fixes.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago"Security fixes" doesn't include support for any new features that Google Apps chooses to use without considering older Firefox versions.
- chrisjsmith 15y agoYou choose Google Apps. Google Apps should not choose you.
- TeHCrAzY 15y agoWhy 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.
- emilsedgh 15y agoDebian 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.
- qjz 15y agoSorry, 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.
- acdha 15y agoThey'll drop support once the costs become significant relative to the number of users. Right now, older IE versions have a much higher cost due to being built on an antique rendering engine - Firefox 3.6 is generally far less expensive unless you actually depend on certain more recent features because it wasn't missing support for so many basic features (e.g. think of the impact on your CSS without something like inline-block versus, say, box-shadow).
- maxxxxx 15y agoThey can't drop IE8 because too many businesses are still on XP.
- jncraton 15y agoThe latest builds of Firefox and Chrome both work fine on XP, so they could theoretically force users to upgrade away from IE altogether.
- asomiv 15y agoThey can't, many businesses rely on Microsoft's browser lockdown support. For example strict IE from browsing through the local disk or restricting settings from being modified. Firefox and Chrome have virtually no lockdown support.
- sixcorners 15y agoCan't you secure everything on the operating system level?
- eddieplan9 15y agoI am sorry, but adapting to a vendor is not how IT departments run (especially when a vendor aims to replace your IT departments).
- nextparadigms 15y agoThey won't as long as they have a significant market share, but IE7's market share is like 6%. I think they can live without that, especially if it means pushing a few more users to upgrade to more modern browsers.
- rapind 15y agoIf 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.html http://blog.chromium.org/2010/07/release-early-release-often...
- jackvalentine 15y agoYou'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.
- r00fus 15y agoCoincident with the debut of admin-less ChromeFrame support, this makes sense.
- Slimy 15y agoThis is old news: http://www.techspot.com/news/44076-google-to-drop-support-for-ie7-firefox-35-safari-3.html http://www.techspot.com/news/44076-google-to-drop-support-fo... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608717 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608717
- Steko 15y agoThe old Microsoft would respond by pushing out 2 major releases in 6 months to reduce Google Apps penetration. Ballmersoft? Notsomuch.
- ericflo 15y agoThat's not really a good tactic, because Google could just change its policies.
- grannyg00se 15y agoIt could also add significant attention to the issue, and backfire horribly.
- Steko 15y agoWhy would it add attention to this issue? Microsoft would just say they are responding to Chrome's accelerated release schedule and redefining what a "major" release is.
- jarrett 15y agoI'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 old browsers, and users would upgrade because every site forces them to. But as an individual web developer, I can't very well just make that call and hope others will follow suit. Because until everyone else does the same, I'm stuck telling my clients they're giving up visitors with older browsers "for the greater good." Not workable. So my current best strategy is to support older browsers, and the same is true for each other developer. Yet as a whole industry, we'd be way better off dropping old browsers. But a huge player like Google can afford to do it unilaterally. And when they do, they create an opportunity for countless small developers like me to do the same. I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon just yet. I plan to embrace this cautiously. We still don't know when it will be safe for freelancers and small companies to drop IE 7 and other dinosaurs. But I predict that day will come much sooner thanks to Google.
- eiji 15y agoLets 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.
- cypherpunks 15y agoThis 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 class and second class citizens. It really doesn't feel like it should be the hard for Google to have some infrastructure where the user can control version transitions. Google makes a new version, but barring security issues, keeps all old versions in their cloud. At that point, you transition when you're ready.
- ericflo 15y agoReally, that doesn't feel like it should be that hard? As a developer, that sound like a nightmare. Services like these aren't just a piece of software that can be versioned, it's a system of systems, each one with certain requirements, limits, supported APIs etc. Wrangling all of that is hard enough just to support one user-facing site, much less keeping every version of the site available and working.
- grannyg00se 15y agoIt also doesn't sound all that hard to update your browser.
- hvs 15y agoDepends on where you work. Banks and financial institutions have notoriously slow upgrade paths in IT.
- notatoad 15y agothey have slow update paths because they can get away with slow update paths. if web developers stop catering to lazy IT departments, maybe they won't be so slow anymore.
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- pizzaburger 15y agoI'm all in favor of anything that puts upgrade pressure on users of IE 6 and 7, but this rolling "current and previous major releases" idea is silly. They should simply establish minimum browser requirements like everybody else and update them when it makes sense to, not arbitrarily leaving it to whenever the browser makers release new versions.
- jtwb 15y ago"Current and previous major releases" is a peaceful approach. There is no discretion involved - at no point was an active decision made to cut off your IE 7 users. Plus, your FF 4 users will know exactly when FF support will be dropped - the day FF 6 is released. Simple.
- rglover 15y agoThis is excellent news. I think those who don't really understand the importance of upgrading will finally see the light when a company like Google encourages, nay, forces it. This is a great day, especially for app developers.
- mey 15y agoDoes this mean if I'm running Google Chrome 10 I won't work with Google Apps? I notice there is a lack of effective major version numbering in Google. When does Google stop supporting it's own browser? It'd also be interesting to see what they intend to do about mobile browsers. How long will an old OpenWave XHTML browser be supported? How long will an Android 1.5 browser?
- antimatter15 15y agoGoogle stops supporting anything below the current shipping version. I think Chrome 12 is the shipping stable version, and Dev is at 14, so in chrome time, version 10 is archaic. But Chrome has the automatic auto-update feature which makes something like 90% of installations upgrade to the latest release within a week of its publication, so versions aren't nearly as much of an issue.
- notatoad 15y agois it even possible to not be running the latest version of chrome? who's still running chrome 10? and despite a lack of official support, there aren't any huge changes between these versions so things will probably still work fine. it just means they aren't testing for it.
- ggchappell 15y agoYes, 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 mistaken, the fact that Ubuntu releases stick with a particular browser version, means that the LTS releases (and 10.04 in particular) will stay with a version of FF long after Google Apps has stopped supporting it. Both of these strike me as serious problems. Perhaps the Google Apps people have not really thought through the ramifications of this policy?
- ghshephard 15y agoI think we can be confident that Google will "Do the right thing" - they aren't blindly following a "Drop Support for versionX when versionCurrent = versionX+2" I'm reasonably certain by that by "Two Major Versions" they are referring to "Versions that alter how the platform interacts with the Web." - So, as long as FF 5 and FF 6 behave reasonably similarly, they'll be treated as the same major version, and Google will support FF4 and FF5/6. Or, it may be the case, after some review, that FF4/FF5/FF6 will all be treated as the same major version, and official support on August, 2011 will be for FF3.6 and FF4/5/6. Time will tell.
- ggchappell 15y ago> I think we can be confident that Google will "Do the right thing"' Well, hopefully. But they've officially announced the dropping of support, so I have to wonder. > I'm reasonably certain by that by "Two Major Versions" they are referring to "Versions that alter how the platform interacts with the Web." That might be. But that makes me wonder about FF. Apparently the changes from 3.5 to 3.6 are more significant than those from 4 to 6. What's the deal with that?
- nitrogen 15y agoI 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 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1551527
- veyron 15y agoDoes anyone have statistics regarding browser usage in the wild?
- noarchy 15y agoThis report was widely discussed, in recent days: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/06/17/report-the-most-common-web-browsers-and-browser-versions-today/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/06/17/report-the-most-common-w...
- dfischer 15y agoThank you so much! I love you Google.
- technogeek00 15y agoTo me it seems Microsoft needs to take a leaf from Google's book and incorporate the automagical browser updating. IE, sadly, has always controlled the browser market because if comes prepackaged and most users are novice and oblivious to updating and system requirements. Sure people will say they are copying Google, but in doing this, they might finally be able to keep up with web standards as they are released instead of supporting new standards 2 years after everyone else does creating this entire version fiasco to begin with.
- _delirium 15y agoGoogle is only really able to do it because nobody is depending too much on stuff built on top of the browser (yet, anyway). When you've built whole internal apps on top of a browser, as many companies have built on IE, frequent upgrades that change anything can be problematic. Firefox is in an interesting in-between position, where they encourage frequent upgrades, but users who use a lot of add-ons are reluctant to upgrade too often, because upgrades often break add-ons. Of course, it's not a problem if every upgrade is backwards-compatible with every add-on and intranet app, but that's tough to pull off.
- fierarul 15y agoI like how they don't even put a version number on Chrome.
- HaloZero 15y agoA 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
- riobard 15y agoMozilla is gonna do frequent updates like Chrome starting from Firefox 5.
- msy 15y agoThis also means they're dropping IE8, which generally is considere to have largest market share at the moment when IE10 comes out, which is already in Beta.
- Tomis 15y agoIn other news, I've been waiting for Opera support for years and I still don't see it in the list of supported browsers.