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

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

[smash]

Well in business land, no other browser is actually supportable. Want reliable proxy autodetect? Most other browsers break on DHCP based WPAD. Want to deploy links, manage security zones, etc via group policy? Good luck. IE runs in the business world because it is actually administer-able via group policy. Mozilla is not.

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

[smash]

Add ons? Why would I want to: roll add-ons to thousands of machines, deal with the breakage when the browser is upgraded, add another fucking configuration tool other than group policy and deal with the associated replication issues between my 60 site multinational network?

Never mind re-testing every application in the enterprise for compatibility with the additional browser, and dealing with 2 configuration items instead of one?

When I can just not deploy another browser, secure the one I have and configure it via policy along with everything else?

It's a non-starter mate. I hate windows as much as anyone, but there are things you can reasonably do, and things that are just a fucking waste of time.

Securing IE, which is on every box by default, so needs to be secured anyway, is not rocket science. Like it or not, many line of business applications are only tested or supported in IE. Does it suck? Sure. But it is the reality we face.

Re:We're stuck on 9

[bill_mcgonigle]

What's the polite way to say "Google doesn't want you as a customer"?

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

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If it does not do what you need then, yes.

You're missing the (valid) underlying point. These administrative tools do work for busy corporate sysadmins, as long as they use IE as their standard in-house browser.

If Mozilla and Google want to play at moving things around every few weeks and not offering meaningful long-term stability, they are simply not as good as Microsoft for business users who need a stable platform to run their intranets and custom apps.

If Mozilla and Google want to circumvent normal security policies and provide potential vulnerabilities in corporate networks as a result, then again they are simply not as good as relying on IE.

Serious organisations have more requirements than supporting some half-baked beta version of a new CSS feature that no-one with real web sites will be using for a few years. IE caters to those requirements. In several cases, Firefox and Chrome do not. That means IE is the better browser for those people. It might not be a popular sentiment with web-design-blog-reading-geeks, but it's a self-evident reality to the guys who are actually running IT for these organisations, and denying it won't change that.