Google Ends Internet Explorer 9 Support In Google Apps

An anonymous reader writes "Google has announced it is discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 9 in Google Apps, including its Business, Education, and Government editions. Google says it has stopped all testing and engineering work related to IE9, given that IE11 was released on October 17 along with Windows 8.1. This means that IE9 users who access Gmail and other Google Apps services will be notified 'within the next few weeks' that they need to upgrade to a more modern browser. Google says this will either happen through an in-product notification message or an interstitial page."

Comments

We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that anyone uses IE except for when they have to

Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land

[The MAZZTer]

Here in businessland they just block Gmail and Google Drive anyway...

Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land

[h4rr4r]

There are addons to manage most if not all browsers. Nor are GPOs the only way to do this.

What you are really saying is incompetent admins can easily do these things with IE so they use it.

Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land

[tepples]

My employer must not be in "businessland" then, because it uses Google Apps mail, and Google Apps mail uses the same codebase as Gmail.

Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land

[datapharmer]

Clearly you have never tried to add a trusted root certificate for your internal domain to firefox. As someone who has, let me tell you firefox is not enterprise ready. Chrome at least uses the windows certificate store and has started adding group policy templates. That said, this is just a powergrab at trying to increase market share by forcing xp users to chrome.

Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land

[datapharmer]

Chrome updates are quite easy to control by using their ADM templates and deploying their enterprise msi via your favorite method. Just think of the smaller version increments as hotfixes. Microsoft pushes them all the time. At least with chrome it is more obvious what they are changing and what it might break by looking at the release notes versus digging through a million kb articles because the microsoft patch say "fixes a problem with internet explorer on some systems" or similar useless crap.

Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land

[cpicon92]

You don't need to use a login script. GP supports pushing files to client machines seamlessly and natively. It's also less than twice the work, because generally Firefox is going to be their "general" web browser, not the one they use for the intranet. You just need to configure some defaults, and possibly force a proxy or something like that.

The complexity is also not needless. Giving your users a choice of browser is a good thing, not necessarily a waste.

Re:IE 9?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

They're only the latest version if you're on a recent version of Windows. Many people aren't.

Re:Walled Garden

[Bogtha]

This is no indication of that. One of the biggest problems web developers face is people using old browsers that aren't as technically capable. It increase the effort required to implement and maintain features, particularly for large, complex web applications.

Google have a long-standing policy to support the most recent major version of browsers and the previous major version. What prompted the dropping of support for Internet Explorer 9 was the release of Internet Explorer 11 a couple of weeks ago.

They described this policy - which applies to all browsers, not just Internet Explorer - a couple of years ago. When they did so, they explicitly provided links to download the latest versions of major browsers, including Internet Explorer.

This is not a conspiracy to punish Internet Explorer users. This is an effort to reduce unnecessary work for their engineering teams.