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Google Incrementally Dropping Support For Older Browsers
AmiMoJo writes "Google announced on its blog that it is dropping support for Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari 3 from the 1st of August. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely."
I wish more sites would do this, I'm so sick of having to help my parents cause their work websites only work with "Internet Explorer 5.5+"
The adds will still work fine, I am sure.
as long as google search somewhat works in links, I'm okay.
Dropping IE7 and S3 makes sense, but why FF3.5? It isn't that old. It was "born" less than two years ago, and EOL has not arrived yet.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Although I typically like the N-1 support for browsers. Surely there will be the people holding on to older versions, and getting them to upgrade would be prying it from their cold dying hands (or being locked in with lack of OS support ... cough IE and Windows XP). The part that gets tricky is the fact with the browser wars appearing to surface again, multiple version releases throughout the year, and then there is the x.5 versions, where does one stop?
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Nobody uses that anymore.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Bold move to stop supporting IE7 - but it is the only way to go in the long run. I hope that other websites do the same. Once IE8 support is dropped as well (when IE10 comes out in about one year), everything will be pretty good. People should just upgrade, it is not that hard. And don't say that IE9+ don't work on Windows XP. Just update to Win already 7 - XP is 10 years old! And if you really want to use XP, go for Chrome or Firefox.
Maybe headaches from sites like google will cause more computer newbies to hit the "upgrade" button. A button that is widely ignored but highly important.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Most browsers out there have pretty good update rates, driven by automatic updaters or a userbase made up of people who want the latest and greatest.
Firefox 3.5? 3.6 has been out for what, a year? 4.0 for several months. By the time this policy goes into effect, Firefox 5 will be out. And while Firefox users are slow to update compared to Chrome, Opera, etc. users, they're still a lot faster than IE users.
There's nothing (other than policy or preference) preventing anyone running IE7 from upgrading to IE8 at least. The minimum OS for IE7 was Windows XP, which can run IE8, and AFAIK there isn't a huge install base of IE7-specific web apps out there like there was with IE6 and ActiveX. And unlike the jump from IE6 to IE7, there isn't a huge change in user interface, so it should be a comfortable jump. People just need some encouragement to do it.
RHEL and Debian use Firefox 3.5, AFAIK. I guess it it will be okay, as long as they keep the simple HTML version, or switch to Chromium.
They already dropped support for any version of Opera years ago!
I have to use IE7 and half the internet doesn't work.
If Slashdot drops support for IE7 my productivity will be even higher.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I wonder if this will extend to any website built in GWT? That would be sort of err...sucky.
I don't blame 'em - it's bad enough to have to cross-develop for multiple browsers, cross-developing for current and past versions of older browsers literally doubles the difficulty involved - especially where an older version doesn't supply some critical functionality (like HTML5).
as i slowly come to realize each day i am the product of corporations like google.com and not the consumer, I am incrementally dropping support for their "cloud" applications.
Good people go to bed earlier.
That's about 10 human years/60 dog years.
Uhm right, but Firefox 3.5 is what is in recently released major STABLE distributions. Sure, you can play with unstable versions at home if you don't mind crashes -- heck, I use Debian sid and Firefox 7.0a1 here, but I wouldn't put them anywhere something that is supposed to stay up reliably. This includes any version of Chrome -- which doesn't receive a modicum of maintenance other than "move to this shiniest but buggiest trunk". Bleeding edge is, well, bleeding and sharp.
You can't expect businesses to drop things that work and jump to something new every a few months. This costs money... will you pay for unnecessary upgrade costs? What else, will you demand people to replace their cars of less than two years age because there's a new model out there?
There is a point where maintaining old junk is pointless, but these guys are ridiculous.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Whatever happened to don't be evil?
No comment on the quality of Google's services or their breadth of support (e.g., Opera), but thank god a major player is taking things to the future. I'm a web developer and every single individual client that can form words with their mouth wants their website to work on every possible platform they know about (which usually just means some crummy version of IE because that's what came with their computer). At least now I can point them to this article and ask them if they think their company is somehow more important than Google (read "so valuable that their company deserves even greater support than one of the biggest companies on the internet"). All I'm saying is this might make things however slightly easier to make cool things for the web. So, for that reason, I have a small smile on my face :)
My stable Debian box comes with the Firefox 3.5. Dear Google, what would I do now?
and Netscape Navigator.
IE7 and FF 3.5 are hardly ancient history.
All-Web-Company Google bring out their own browser, sure took them a while to drop the competition.
until there is only Chrome left?
Dropping legacy support is not a very good thing to do when legacy means a couple of years.
The title and summary fail to mention that this is specifically only for google apps. I'm sure google search will still work for older browsers. I got really excited at first before i went and read the actual blog post. Still a step in the right direction though.
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
As usual, the summary leaves out an important modifier -- this only applies to Google APPS, not Google.
From TFA:
Google will still support all older browsers on its search engine. It wouldn't make sense to discriminate there.
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but I'm not complaining. Google dropping support for old browsers like IE7 is a huge help to web developers everywhere. I only wish that Yahoo and Google would join with Google so none of the major search engines supported these out-dated browsers anymore.
For those 3 people still using those browsers.
I may have to start incrementally dropping my use of Google's products. You know, for one of their competitors' products. When their short-sightedness compels me to do so because they don't provide applications I want for the technology I have.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
The web was supposed to be a platform-agnostic, browser-agnostic way to share information. Then Microsoft did everything it could to hijack that, by adding nonstandard tags and a whole proprietary scripting language and carpet-bombing the world with development tools that used those proprietary lock-ins in an effort to turn the Web into just another Windows application.
Corporate intranets did become a cesspool of lock-in. Whether it was apps designed in house or apps that they purchased, many of them used proprietary, Microsoft-developed extensions. And many of those extensions break under any browser newer than IE6.
With the exception of their search engine and related functions, without which they would die, Google is one of the worst examples of software providers. They make programs with incomplete functionality, difficult and nonstandard interfaces, and other obvious flaws. It's "OOH SHINY" and not ready for serious work.
Google behaves as if it were run by amateurs, and breaking compatibility is just what is to be expected from such clowns.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If they keep only the two latest versions and drop the third, does that mean support for Firefox 4 will be dropped when Firefox 6 comes out? Firefox 6 is planned to come out in the Fall. There is a downside to the rapid schedule.
from TFA:
So if you are using Firefox and they stick to their announced release schedule, you will have to change to a new version of Firefox every 6 months.
eg.
v4 - now
v5 - in 3 months
v6 - in 6 months
v4 is then the third oldest version and no longer supported. 3 months later v5 is the third oldest and no longer supported. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
They really need to take into account that not everyone releases equally frequently. Instead of the above, Google should support the last two releases and all browsers released within the last X months. (Where X is preferably about 18 months).
So they should do less compatibility than what they are doing?
I don't think this is meant as punishment. It's not about time; I expect this is meant to reduce the test matrix. As such, number of major versions supported is relevant. Time these major versions have been out is probably not relevant.
Why not show an annoying popup when an old browser is detected?
That will motivate users to upgrade.
And it will be especially effective if a lot of websites would play this trick. I'm actually surprised nobody successfully pulled off a campaign to do exactly this in the old IE6 days (actually not so long ago).
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
If a personal user is still using safari 3 they need a kick n the arse. The browsers are all free! Whats the problem? Not like they invested millions in buying shit.
Enterprise? If you are still on IE 5 then u need to move up if anything for the increase in security and maybe the quality of your internet life may improve aswell in the process
Care to share?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
If your still using such an old os (well, any unpatched os including new)
I've been told that as long as Windows XP has Service Pack 3 before it connects to the Internet, whether through slipstream or the dedicated SP3 disc, it's still patched enough to make it to Windows Update and get fully patched before getting compromised. And Microsoft plans to continue to provide new patches for Windows XP for well over two more years.
The Google Apps dashboard is already broken when trying to access it with firefox-3.5.16 from debian stable. You get the menus but the main content area with user management options and the like is just blank. I couldn't even figure out how they broke it looking at the source thanks to the obfuscation. I had to use chromium just to use a very simplistic html form - which is ridiculous. It seems we are quickly leaving the Extend stage and diving right into the Extinguish stage.
Better prepare and have an escape plan, before they drop support for everything but chrome.
Already feels like they are making sure pages don't work quite as well in other browsers than their own - way to go microsoft
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
They're dropping support for anybody who can't/won't buy multi hundred dollar hardware/software 'upgrades' every two years... which of course sucks when you have to replace all your perfectly functional stuff for no real logical reason. Totally bogus! I already ran into this problem with a fresh Tiger install and Google wouldn't even display the results of a search I was doing. I had to spend wasted hours on many updates first.. and it's all coming out of the client's wallet. If not for the damn zombies who have to have the latest shiny gimmick because of the ads they saw, this wouldn't be happening.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Can we stop using version numbers and start dating them correctly with the release year? I couldn't tell you what version of Chrome I'm using, let alone what the newest version of IE XP will allow you to install. Version numbers are pretty meaningless at this point.
FF 3.5 - June, 2009
IE 7 - October, 2006
Safari 3 - June, 2007
Ok, so Google is no longer supporting a 2 year old browser, a 5 year old browser, and the 4 year old mac browser. I had to wiki that. Does anyone actually keep tabs on version dates? IE 7 still sounds new to me. Maybe I'm just getting old.
moox. for a new generation.
How many web enabled gadgets go obsolete every time a browser is deprecated? Without community support for firmware upgrades nettops, PDAs, and content streamers go obsolete far too quickly given the amount of energy and natural resources consumed by their production, IMHO.
There are lot of issue with new browser. Especially with the Fire Fox 4. I like the version 3 of firefox. I hope google don't drop support with FireFox older versions.
This is how progress is made! This way web developers may focus more on usability and performance, rather that implementing hacks to make the things work in older browsers.
Having a big player like Google to officially stop supporting the old browsers will really force the users to move on and upgrade.
Anybody who uses Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites needs to have their head examined anyway. Companies might as well just cc: mainland China with every spreadsheet they post to google docs.
It is irresponsible of Google to create obsolescence by discontinuing support for older systems. This policy creates more trash filling the landfills and is a waste of resources. Many people have older hardware that won't run newer browers. Google's action is going to force people to throw away perfectly good hardware. This is anything but green. Bad, Google. Google's doing evil, again.
Those browsers are not that old. I've worked for companies that developed web applications for institutions and they are still supporting IE 6.
I'm on Ubuntu 10.10 with Firefox 4.01. A few weeks ago I noticed that email reminders of calender events I put in Google's calendar were no longer working. I thought it was something I did and decided to look at it later while I had time. I Googled around last night. I discovered that Google Calender event reminders have simply stopped working for many people, with no reason identified and very little, if anything said about it by Google. Luckily I only missed reminders like "take out the trash".
Other people have narrowly missed meetings.
I was kind of surprised I heard nothing about this issue on slashdot. It has existed for at least 1 - 2 months for many people.
I noticed the mention of apps simply not working with the this story. I wonder if it is about Google trying to reduce the size of the are where they have to investigate this problem.
We seem to be sliding from one extreme (development being held back by the need to support 10+ year old legacy systems) to the other (updates every few months, obsolescence after a year). From corporates taking 18 months to approve and roll-out a software update to bloody auto-update encouraging users to fix what ain't broke every morning.
Now, in the not-too-distant-future there will come a time to draw a line in the sand and say "From now on we'll only support browsers that correctly implement these HTML5/CSS features..." - although from what I've seen of HTML5 support we're not there yet (it would help if the HTML5 standard was actually finished, came with a reference implementation to resolve any ambiguity in the standards and, basically, was being developed by IETF instead of W3C) but this sort of mechanistic "last but one version" plan, with no consideration given to timing or what had actually changed between browsers sounds a bit too simplistic.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Chrome doesn't appear to be on that list... seems like its all of the big competitors to Chrome. /aluminumfoilhat
It would be far more efficient if we all used the same browser, the same search engine, the same operating system, spoke the same language, drove on the same side of the road, used the same measuring system, all paid our bills by direct debit, stuck to the speed limits, obeyed all laws at all times, had all our movements logged and monitored, drove the same type of car, and took our holidays in the same select list of resorts.
It all depends what you want from this world. If you want freedom you have to put up with a bit less 'efficiency'. People value the language they learnt as a child and drinking half a litre of beer in an English pub is just not the same as drinking a pint. Direct debit is exactly the same as allowing the corporation direct access to your bank account and shifts all the worry about errors and fraud from the corporation on to the customer's shoulders - good for the corporation; not so good for the customer.
Google is not acting in everyone's interest when it forces users to abandon software they are used to in favour of newer software which has more complexity and more ways for the corporation website to screw you.
It's about time people started fighting for their freedom because at the moment the corporations and the politicians they connive with are winning with no sign of opposition.
...being able to assume that everyone is using the latest version of their browser.
I have trouble accessing certain features of Google programs in the latest version of Chrome. How is this announcement newsworthy?