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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."
why do IE9 need any "special support" at all? standards-incompatible browser?
Here in businessland they just block Gmail and Google Drive anyway...
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.
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.
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.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Sometimes it isn't YOUR company's app you need to use. In the real world, businesses deal with OTHER BUSINESSES.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
They're only the latest version if you're on a recent version of Windows. Many people aren't.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
My employer must not be in "businessland" then, because it uses Google Apps mail, and Google Apps mail uses the same codebase as Gmail.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
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.
Get a web developer
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.
Get a web developer
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.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
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.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Slashdot still shows the IE8 icon.
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.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.