Google Kills Apps Support For Internet Explorer 8

An anonymous reader writes "Google today [Friday] announced it is discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 8 in Google Apps, including its Business, Education, and Government editions. The kill date is November 15, 2012. After that, IE8 users accessing Google Apps will see a message recommending that they upgrade their browser."

Comments

Lucky bastards

[maroberts]

I still have to support IE6 :-(

Re:Lucky bastards

[nedlohs]

The codebase he supports is supposed to work with a given COBOL system.

Whereas said web crap that has to support IE6, also has to work with IE7, and IE8, and IE9, and Firefox, and Chrome, and Safari. And it has to "look good" in the recent browsers without looking like crap in IE6.

Re:Lucky bastards

[toejam13]

Our company still supports older browsers such as IE5 - IE7, but we strip a huge amount of functionality away. No CSS, no images and as little scripting on the client-side as possible. It is basically provided as-is. And people use it.

The next big thing for us is to switch from bitmap (PNG, JPG) to vector (SVG) graphics for static images. That means that IE8 and Android Browser 2.x are on the chopping block unless we want to use <object> tags to embed bitmaps as a fallback.

We're aware that means the end of support for IE on XP. But the OS is over a decade old. Windows 7 is fairly reliable and can run on some fairly geriatric hardware (I've gotten to a W7 desktop with both P2/450 and K6-2/500 systems). The corporate sector is slowly being pushed to W7 kicking and screaming because XP driver support for new laptops is starting to wither. For home users, you have to wonder if they're just being cheap. If they can't fork out for an OS upgrade once a decade, how else will they be like on the consumer side?

But then you have the Android issue. I'm using Cyanogenmod 7.1 on my own handset, but that's still Gingerbread 2.3.7. And I consider myself lucky to be even that far. There are some fairly recent handsets that are still using Gingerbread. So do we want to relegate them to the legacy site or keep Gingerbread support? Most of those devices are too small to take advantage of SVG anyways. The tablets could, and most of them run 3.x or 4.x which includes full SVG support in the Android Browser.

Eventually it'll come down to numbers. Is SVG worth it? How much do we save by no longer certifying those legacy browsers? What other gains do we get from retiring support for legacy browsers? How many people are willing to use the legacy site? We just don't know yet.

Re:Lucky bastards

[justforgetme]

IMHO chrome has become too much of a behemoth. I'd migrate them to Firefox. A fresh OS with chrome on a 7 year old laptop grinds to a halt on the first page. The same setup is perfectly usable with an up to date Firefox

Another nail for XP

[juventasone]

The summary leaves out the interesting part: IE8 is the latest version available for Windows XP. And there's no place that XP exists more than business, education, and government. This is Google's way to get sysadmins comfortable with Chrome in the workplace.

Re:Another nail for XP

[viperidaenz]

Businesses don't tend to use the OS install that comes with the machine, they load their own builds they have made and tested themselves.

Support = security fixes.Come 11 April 2014, no more security fixes for XP. Good luck getting Office 2014* that will install on XP as well.

* or 2015, 2016, 2017....

Big businesses won't move

[Tony Isaac]

It takes a LONG time for big businesses to move to new versions of anything. They are just now moving off of Windows XP and IE 7. Many major software systems used by big companies (such as GE Centricity) still don't even support IE 9, so customers of such software can't move forward even if they wanted to!

It looks like Google is taking a page out of Apple's book. It's stunts like this that keep Apple out of the office (for the most part). Microsoft, on the other hand, has a reputation for supporting legacy software just about forever...lots of old DOS programs still work! Microsoft has been rewarded by businesses in a big way.

Is this an opening for Yahoo?

It's well deserved.

[mosb1000]

Anyone still using IE 8 deserves to be left out in the cold. Modern browsers are free, and work much better than that ancient piece of crap. If your IT department doesn't have it's shit together enough to let you run a real web browser, you can't expect most of the internet to work for you either. Don't complain to Google, you should seriously be considering replacing whoever it is who is making your IT decisions for you.

Re:It's well deserved.

[mosb1000]

You are wrong. There are a number of HTML 5 technologies (especially canvas objects) that IE 8 doesn't support. Many special concessions must be made to support IE 8 from a modern web-based application. It often means writing two versions of you code, one for IE 8 and one for everything else. Supporting IE 8 means limiting the functionality of you application while adding complexity to your code. I'm sure there was a collective sigh of relief among web developers when they heard Google was dropping IE 8, it means their employers will soon follow suit.

They aren't blocking IE 8 users, they're just dropping support for the browser. That means some features won't work correctly or at all, and as time goes on the whole site will stop working as the continue to roll out new features that aren't supported in IE 8.

Re:It's well deserved.

[KingMotley]

Off the top of my head:
Opacity (real opacity, including opacity on PNGs with an alpha channel).
Being able to define colors using RGBA
CSS3 transforms
Fully supporting @font-face for real web fonts
HTML5 video support with H.264/MPEG4 so we can drop flash video players finally
WOFF font support instead of the EOT (IE-only font format)
Box shadows
multiple backgrounds on a single object
CSS3 selectors (:last-child, :nth-child, etc)

Stuff even IE9 doesn't support:
text-shadows
3d transforms
aync on script tags
web sockets
Filereader API (Smarter upload buttons)
CSS3 transitions
CSS3 gradients
HTML5 form elements (date picker, range, integer, etc)

Yes, those are all things that we use on our web site, or wanted to use and either had to write custom fallbacks just for IE, rewrite to use a different (more difficult, less efficient, larger) technique, or just let IE look like crap.

Re:It's well deserved.

[repvik]

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

So we deserve to be left out in the cold, because we have a need for applications that have yet to be upgraded to support IE9+? Our IT department employs 260+ people, and while you may claim that they "haven't got their shit together" I know these people pretty well, and they're pretty competent. IE8 is three years old. That isn't stoneage. And since IE breaks compatibility every single release, that means that more than 600 of the applications we provide (most external, some internal) have to be updated, re-tested and pushed. Almost once a year. Are you f*cking kidding me?
Chrome with their incremental upgrade model is a complete no-go. We can't have the browser suddenly upgrading and breaking a critical system either. Firefox has major revisions every other week, which is even worse for an enterprise setup.

In a small IT shop with Office and little else, being stuck on XP and IE8 would be gross incompetence. For a large company supporting more than 3k applications, it's not so much a choice. And it's not as easy as switching to other applications either, since many of these are specialist apps for which no alternative applications are available.

Thank you

[maroberts]

Couldn't have put it better myself, except you missed out supporting phone browsing too. :-)

I can program in COBOL and its easier than supporting several generations of browsers.