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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?
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.
What's the polite way to say "Google doesn't want you as a customer"?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.