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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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 <i>drop support for it</i> when FF 6 is released in a couple of months???<p>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.<p>Both of these strike me as serious problems. Perhaps the Google Apps people have not really thought through the ramifications of this policy?
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.
I'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.
This is excellent news. I think those who don't really understand the importance of upgrading will finally see the light when a company like <i>Google</i> encourages, nay, forces it. This is a great day, especially for app developers.
To 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.
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
This 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.
Does this mean if I'm running Google Chrome 10 I won't work with Google Apps?<p>I notice there is a lack of effective major version numbering in Google. When does Google stop supporting it's own browser?<p>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?
This is old news:
<a href="http://www.techspot.com/news/44076-google-to-drop-support-for-ie7-firefox-35-safari-3.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.techspot.com/news/44076-google-to-drop-support-fo...</a>
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608717" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608717</a>
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 class and second class citizens.<p>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.