Google Incrementally Dropping Support For Older Browsers 353
AmiMoJo writes "Google announced on its blog that it is dropping support for Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari 3 from the 1st of August. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely."
The Adds, however (Score:2, Insightful)
links (Score:4, Insightful)
as long as google search somewhat works in links, I'm okay.
Re:Well done, Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:links (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, go update your browser so you can get a test of the latest ultra buggy, ultra shitty web 2.0 experience from the slashcode monkeys that will bog down even the fastest browsers running on quad core systems. Oh but don't expect unicode support because that would just be far too much effort to implement.
Do they care only about toys? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm right, but Firefox 3.5 is what is in recently released major STABLE distributions. Sure, you can play with unstable versions at home if you don't mind crashes -- heck, I use Debian sid and Firefox 7.0a1 here, but I wouldn't put them anywhere something that is supposed to stay up reliably. This includes any version of Chrome -- which doesn't receive a modicum of maintenance other than "move to this shiniest but buggiest trunk". Bleeding edge is, well, bleeding and sharp.
You can't expect businesses to drop things that work and jump to something new every a few months. This costs money... will you pay for unnecessary upgrade costs? What else, will you demand people to replace their cars of less than two years age because there's a new model out there?
There is a point where maintaining old junk is pointless, but these guys are ridiculous.
And people cheered them with IE6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Dropping legacy support is not a very good thing to do when legacy means a couple of years.
Re:Do they care only about toys? (Score:3, Insightful)
I forgot to add that if you think it is expensive for businesses to keep up with software releases, you should see how expensive it is when they don't.
Re:Praise Xena (Score:4, Insightful)
A very significant portion of remaining IE6/7 users are enterprise users not allowed to change their browser, due to internal apps not being certified. Cutting support like that will only cut traffic to the sites and piss off their users, the users wont be able to do anything about it. Heck, even Microsoft wants IE6/7 to die. About the only hope to kill of this IE6/7 user base is that corporations keep adopting Windows 7 - a project that include testing and updating for compatibility all around.
Much of which is because many companies won't spend the money on upgrading or testing, even though they know their apps are ancient and need refreshing. As soon as the CEO can't get to his gmail account (or, more likely, Redtube), he'll be screaming at IT to push through the plan to do whatever it takes to fix the problem.
Personally, I'd just like to be able to use transparent images on a web page without having IE6 mangle them.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)