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Google Kills Apps Support For Internet Explorer 8

Posted by timothy on from the start-at-the-feet-and-kill-up dept.

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."

5 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Lucky bastards by maroberts · · Score: 5, Funny

    I still have to support IE6 :-(

    --

    Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
    Karma: Chameleon

    1. Re:Lucky bastards by nedlohs · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Lucky bastards by toejam13 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Another nail for XP by juventasone · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:It's well deserved. by repvik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.