Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.