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

[MickyTheIdiot]

Okay... really... I have a hard time feeling bad about that.

The fact is that those companies bought into web apps that worked on ONE browser. That's stupid. As a matter of fact, if you are going to build an app that works on ONE browser on ONE platform why not write the thing in an actual language because the advantage is supposed to be using it on multiple platforms.

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

[smash]

Not quite that bad here, i've gotten rid of almost all of our XP, but we have apps that work in IE9, but not IE10. One app won't work in IE9 yet, and unfortunately it's not our app - we're a contractor and the customer's flight booking app is IE8 or previous only.

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]

Sometimes it isn't YOUR company's app you need to use. In the real world, businesses deal with OTHER BUSINESSES.

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

[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 IE 6 or 8 here in business land

[Anonymous Coward]

What do security zones actually do to help you, except allow programmers to get away with abysmally sloppy design within the confines of your "local intranet"? IE contains tons of so-called "security" in order to plaster over crap that should have been handled properly elsewhere. Oh, and do your WPAD over DNS if you really think you need that over a transparent proxy.

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

[h4rr4r]

If it does not do what you need then, yes.
Believing the built in one is the only one, yes. Not finding a solution to a business need, yes. All of those would make you incompetent.

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

[smash]

Chrome less so, at least they provide ADM templates. But you still need to deal with automatic updates breaking your certification process (again, IE = easy via WSUS) and the fact that IE is already there. If there is a BUSINESS NEED for Google apps, then maybe the sensible thing to do is to run IE 10 for those users who need it. If there is no business need for an app that WILL NOT RUN in IEx then there's very little sense in deploying an additional browser.

And no, you can't just secure IE by pointing it at a dummy proxy - because the components in it are used throughout Windows and Office for rendering HTML and other stuff. So you need to secure it properly. Adding another browser on top is just adding complexity and additional workload. Unless there is a valid business case for it (I'm yet to see one in the real world) then it is a waste of time (and thus, the company's money) going there.

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.

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

[h4rr4r]

I am a busy corporate sysadmin.
That is why I am saying this. I am using firefox for a lot of folks as IE cannot properly render the web sites these employees have to use.

Serious organization normally means lots of deadwood and you and I both know it.

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

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You obviously have to cater for your own users, but if they really are running into work-related sites that don't work on recent versions of IE with any regularity, your case is an outlier.

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

[Guspaz]

Even businessland has largely abandoned IE6 in most of the world... the marketshare of IE6 in North America is 0.2%. China is the only country with any significant use of IE6.

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

[smash]

I'm not just talking about apps within my walls. Exhibit a: we are a mining contractor, and we need to fly staff to and from remote sites. A number of our clients use a min-site management system that does accomation bookings, flight bookings, etc. To get on/off site we need to use it. It runs in IE only.

We don't use it, we don't get on site. We don't get on site, we don't earn any money.

It's not our app. We have no control over it and no ability to make decisions regarding it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for web standards and ripping out broken crap, but you don't always have a choice, and you play the hand you're dealt.

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

[MobyDisk]

You listed IE-specific solutions, then complain that only IE supports them.

Want reliable proxy autodetect? Most other browsers break on DHCP based WPAD.

Use a transparent proxy. Those stupid proxy servers that you have to configure in each application suck. Most applications don't support it. Secure download sites don't work, secure FTP is unreliable. Even Microsoft's own MSDN download manager doesn't support a proxy server.

Want to deploy links, manage security zones, etc via group policy?

By "deploy links" I take that to mean "shove bookmarks into people's browsers" which is better handled by putting those links on the intranet site. That works with any browser, any OS, with less work. No special corporate policy required.

The primary purpose of security zones is so you can run ActiveX controls. No other browser needs special security settings for ActiveX.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

we have webapps that for obvious reasons do not run on IE

For what obvious reasons would you be referring? IE9 and especially IE10/11 are easily as standards compliant for HTML5 and CSS3+ as Firefox is (with the possible exception of transitions not working as specified... but who uses those for business apps?)

It's clear that you're just a typical /. anti-MS hater, there's no need for you to couch that in erroneous / inaccurate technical double-speak The fact that you espouse looking for and using 3rd party applications to redundantly apply functions that already exist within the OS/vendor stack aptly demonstrates that your animosity exceeds your common sense...

-AC

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

[MobyDisk]

Now I cam curious: could you expand on that? What else does one disable/enable on different security zones?

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

[Billly Gates]

Time to switch to Office 365 then.

They value our time and costs it takes after millions to get IE 8 just year. WTF

Google wont have customers anymore at this rate. The 22 year old programmers there have never worked in a production environment. Google doesnt count as they money to burn and its not labeled a cost center

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

[smash]

Administrator access for everybody! Right? Good luck with that.

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

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that if you've ever been responsible for sysadmin at all, it was only for a relatively small organisation. If you're responsible for a large organisation with many members of staff who aren't necessarily technically skilled, locking down your average staffer to a controlled, secured system is exactly what you want to do, and then maybe you also allow case-by-case exceptions for people who do know what they're doing.

If you allow more options, your help desk costs will be through the roof, not least because the ability for non-technical staff to become accustomed to established processes and then help each other goes way down.

In the specific case of browsers, you also have to consider the cost of maintaining your intranet applications and retesting every new version of a browser before it deploys. This is never going to happen on a six-weekly schedule for each major browser, because that would impose an absurd level of overhead on everyone maintaining those applications. But right now, Mozilla think a period of roughly a year constitutes long-term support, which clearly places them on a different planet from the professionals who actually have responsibility for these things.

Also, the cost of recovering from a successful attack on your infrastructure is horrible. The fewer chances that unskilled users have to screw up and let something bad in, the more you reduce the risk. One of the highest risk groups in the enterprise is the kind of user who thinks they know what they're doing and then opens up vulnerabilities you wouldn't otherwise have. They'll be the first to complain that your draconian restrictions are stopping them from doing something that in reality saves them a few seconds per day, and the last to take responsibility for that $100,000 outage while every infected machine in the department is restored from known good images or the painful fines for regulatory compliance violations because you can't audit your outgoing traffic for data leakage any more. (Well, the last except for anyone in management, who for some reason tend to assume rules don't apply to them despite lacking the technical understanding to even make that kind of judgement rationally.)

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, I'm allowed access to anything I want. You see, the company I work at understands that its employees are all adults and are capable of exercising self-control. That's why they don't try to control us like children as your company apparently does.

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

[sd4f]

Stubborn IE users should be treated as addicts and sent to rehab.

Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

why do IE9 need any "special support" at all? standards-incompatible browser?

Re:Well,

[cdrudge]

It doesn't need special support necessarily. It's just a way for a company to officially say that they are discontinuing support for that browser to guarantee that it works. You still may be able to use the previous version to the full app's potential, but if you do have a problem, do go crying to Google about it.

The exact same policy that exists for IE exists for Firefox and Safari as well. They support the current and second most recent version, and discontinue the 3rd most recent. It's less of a big deal with Firefox and Safari as they usually can be updated to the latest version automatically or at least with little issue with pretty much any OS version. Current versions of IE on the other hand only work with the latest versions of their OS. IE8 was the last version to work on XP. IE9 was the last version to work on Vista. There are still a lot of computers that run XP and Vista that could have unsupported problems now or in the future with Google Apps unless they switch to a modern browser.

Walled Garden

[0xG]

Although IE* is crap, I can see that Google is heading for the walled garden approach, like Apple.
Use our apps. Best with Chrome...

Re:Walled Garden

[i kan reed]

Yeah, at some point recentyish Google crossed into completely unlikable territory. While that might drive technically adept people away, their momentum and existing user base can be mined for as much money as possible in the meantime. 10 years ago google was awesome. Today, I wouldn't bat an eye if they got wiped from the face of the planet.

Re:Walled Garden

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yeah, I started using Apps for nonprofits for a local group, and sometime in the early summer, the spreadsheets stopped working for anything but Chrom[e,ium], as far as columns lining up with the row markers. There's an open issue on it, lots of people bitching about current Firefox being broken, but no fixes or response from Google.

Obviously, I need to switch to a different solution, since I can't force all my volunteers to use a particular browser.

Re:Walled Garden

[Nerdfest]

They've done a couple of out of character things lately (youtube play button signing people up for Google+, and XMPP support), but I don't think dropping support for a browser that doesn't follow standards is particularly bad. I think they're still a lesser evil than any of their competitors in most markets. I'm not saying that it's a high bar or anything ...

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.

Re:Walled Garden

[bill_mcgonigle]

the only thing obvious here is that firefox is not following the w3c standard.

Strong claim - which one would that be?

they are much more likely to oblige if you offer them money in return for their services

Google Apps devs are participating?

Re:Walled Garden

[the_greywolf]

It's more than 2-3 extra lines. IE8 and IE9 don't have XHR2, so you have to use the XDomainRequest ActiveX control, which behaves differently, doesn't support anything other than GET and POST, and is riddled with silly bugs like, "if the progress handler isn't set, requests won't be processed at all in IE9, with no errors."

Never mind the fact that the XHR object in IE8/9 is broken as all hell.

We're stuck on 9

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Hell, we moved off of 6 sometime this year. We don't personally run Google Apps, but we can't be unique in having IE restrictions such as that.

We're also a Linux firm, and the latest Firefox you can run on our Linux (RedHat AS 5, moving to 6) is Firefox 17. Chrome/Chromium won't even run at all.

Re:We're stuck on 9

[bill_mcgonigle]

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

Re:IE 9?

[Horshu]

Because they're the latest versions, and they're free?

Re:Choice

[smash]

Given that IE10 and up are Windows 7 onwards only, I suspect a large proportion of the XP diehards will "GTFO".

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.

And yet...

[FuzzNugget]

Slashdot still shows the IE8 icon.

I'll be leaving after xmas

[fast turtle]

I'm already looking into alternatives to Gmail and all of their other products as they've already dropped support for my browser. I'm even going to dump my Nexus 7 on my brother since it never did allow me to compose emails while off-line. Same thing for docs or even adding a calendar entry (main reason we'd got it - doctor appointments).

Once I wipe my gmail/g+/calendar/docs and groups I'm going to finish blocking Google completely in my hosts file. Don't need em and don't want them wasting my bandwidth.