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."
Praise Xena (Score:5, Informative)
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If they really want to kill IE6, and other older browsers; Google, Facebook, Youtube, and the American Idol home pages need to cut support cold turkey and provide links to the top three current browsers, in random order(as to prevent the top one from being the most downloaded). Same with IPv6, just start throwing up a page for IPv4 users that says, "Hey! You're using IPv4, and this web site requires you to switch to IPv6. Here's how to change to IPv6. If you can't, call your ISP at ### and tell them you want IPv6!"
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.
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.
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IE6 not supporting alpha channels in PNG files? There's a hack for that!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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In this case it is Google Apps.
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You kinda missed a point somewhere. If your enterprise must have IE6 for internal apps, fine - use IE6 for internal apps. That dinosaur of a browser will be just fine for running stupid software that should have been deprecated by now.
JUST DON'T BROWSE THE WEB WITH IE6!!! The IT department can install another browser, to exist side-by-side with IE6, on those computers that actually require an outside connection. And, the same IT department should have locked down IE6 to use an internal proxy that has no
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I fail to see a problem there, apart from Google, none of those other sites are ones which should be used at work anyways. Besides, if corporate America is so cheap and incompetent as to still be in that position, well they deserve it, this is a bit like pitching camp on railroad tracks, sure there might not be a train coming now, but there will be one eventually. People who get burned in this fashion really deserve it.
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I think if Google wants to provide a link to chrome first, then firefox and then opera and then IE/Sarfi that is fine. They are not a convicted monopolist. And Chrome, Firefox and Opera are available on all platforms. IE and Chrome, not so much.
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The list is quite strange imho. What's wrong with firefox 3.5? I'm on 3.6 myself, and have no intention to upgrade until mozilla gets it's "must remove all comforts of a PC in favor of making browser look like it's on a tablet" crap. Which is probably not coming in a couple of years.
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These are all versions which you have no excuse to still be on, so Google is simply saying that they will no longer test for those browsers or fix bugs found only in those browsers.
Anyone on FF3.5 can move to 3.6, IE7 to 8, and Safari 3 to 4, so there are no valid reasons to still use them. Those browsers don't have any IE6-like hold on a market due to shitty apps coded explicitly for them, nor are there major changes which could throw off a user.
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I have IE 8 in my VM of Windows XP... just checked. When they give up on IE 8... well, hopefully, Windows XP will die by then as well. Right now, I do most of my development on Windows XP, since most of my clients are still using XP for their users (most are up to Windows 7 etc by now for admins, but not for what users are actually using the software we give them; of course, for some of the admin pieces of software that my company's software interacts with, Windows 7 is required, but XP is still fine for th
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These are all versions which you have no excuse to still be on, so Google is simply saying that they will no longer test for those browsers or fix bugs found only in those browsers.
Anyone on FF3.5 can move to 3.6...
When they came for the Firefox 3.5 users, I cared not, for I used Firefox 3.6. When they came for me ...
I still use FF 3.6, because certain sites (PACER being the number one most important) don't work reliably on FF 4+. (PACER, at least for my district, has all the polish and technical aplomb of a circa-1997 Perl/HTML 3.2 enterprise site, and it's not likely to change much in the future. Hell, the judiciary is still using WordPerfect!)
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You missed the second part about there not really being anything which only works in these versions. I'm sure someone can come up with something obscure, but it's not like the IE6 stragglers who actually have an excuse.
Why should Google continue to support outdated and/or broken browsers when all but a tiny handful of the remaining users of those browsers don't actually have a reason to and are just lazy about updating?
People also seem to think that Google will be putting up a wall like some stupidly desig
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"Anyone on FF3.5 can move to 3.6, ..."
Speak for yourself. I'm stuck on FF3.5.x due to my university's SoE policy, and can't upgrade beyond that using the standard FF install (I'd have to grab one of the 3rd-party stand-alone / USB stick releases). Even despite the fact that everybody accesses their email via Exchange webmail, 90+% of people use either FF or Chrome (which is also an old version in the SoE).
We're also heavy users of Google Calendar - everything that needs to be accessed by both staff & st
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What's wrong with firefox 3.5?
Nothing specifically. I think they are going for "the current stable release" and "the previous major stable release", and are considering 3.6 to be a major release. Presumably they are doing the same with the other browsers (it seems to be the case with IE for instance).
This could cause a problem in corporate environments where it takes an age to move from one browser to another (hence so many sites still running IE6 and some (like our banking clients) only just moving from that to IE8), so hopefully fo
The Adds, however (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Adds, however (Score:5, Funny)
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Indeed, being hunted down by a secretive, rogue, covert action group can just ruin your whole day.
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links (Score:4, Insightful)
as long as google search somewhat works in links, I'm okay.
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.
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It's not even an *up to date* browser - with slashdot you have to be careful about being too old OR too new...
Re:links (Score:5, Funny)
I'm certain that I'm running the most recent version of Netscape (although I haven't seen any updates in a while). I'm glad they're not dropping me.
Re:links (Score:5, Funny)
What's "Netscape"? Is that the new Mosaic?
Re:links (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you can still download it and find out! [netscape.com]
(yeah, I was kind of amazed too).
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Netscape is still being updated. You can download it from here [mozilla.com].
Basically Welcomed (Score:2)
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Better than N-1 support is N-1 or, say 24 months, whichever is longer - that way you don't end up having to retire support for browsers every 6 weeks to keep up with the development cycles.
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Surely there will be the people holding on to older versions, and getting them to upgrade would be prying it from their cold dying hands (or being locked in with lack of OS support ... cough IE and Windows XP).
Don't forget websites which only work with specific versions of browsers. That's the only reason I keep a copy of Firefox 3 around--one particular campus site doesn't work with Firefox 4.
Should just drop support for IE entirely (Score:3, Funny)
Nobody uses that anymore.
Re:Should just drop support for IE entirely (Score:4, Informative)
I still don't think it's quite as good as the recent versions of Chrome and Firefox, but I think some credit is due to Microsoft on that front.
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I really find it odd to admit, but I've found that developing in IE9 is a pleasure in so far as development in IE can be. Seriously! They have dev tools built-in (not as good as firebug, but it is enough to work out kinks!) It supports SVG (I do some things as vectors when I know that they are going to scale for the situation. It is for generic JS tools that are meant to be used anywhere in our web suite. simply:
var hasSvg = false; try{hasSvg = document.implementation.hasFeature("http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/
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They can copy code like no one else?
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Actually, for my web sites/pages i recently dropped support for Chrome/Iron and Safari. My apologies to Iron, but Firefox and Opera are both better and there's no reason
not to use them.
The reason to use Chrome on desktop is because 1) you prefer the UI, or 2) you prefer the speed (yes it's faster than Opera, much less Firefox), or 3) you want integration with Google services. Then, of course, there are smartphones. iOS users don't exactly have a choice, and Android - well, it has Opera Mobile, but that has its quirks compared to stock WebKit browser.
In any case, you as a web designer is not the one who should question user's choice of a web browser, so long as that browser adheres to stan
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Ubuntu LiveCD
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Well done, Google (Score:2)
Re:Well done, Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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People should just upgrade, it is not that hard
Please mail me a cheque. My laptop at home is a 1 GHz PIII with 750ish megs of RAM running XP. It works fine, but the only browser that works reasonably well is IE7. Firefox is dog slow. I shouldn't need to buy hundreds of dollars of hardware just to surf the web...
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Heh, I agree with you on that point -- advanced CAD tech seems to be one of the worst things that ever happened to car design from an aesthetic point of view.
Designers now have crazy power to make almost shape practical, but it's pretty clear their design sense has not kept up with their tools....
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Chrome would be faster than Firefox generally, though I'll not go as far as recommending you try (though it'd not do any harm to install and remove if it runs like a three legged asthmatic & arthritic dog) it as I'm not sure how well it will cope with limited memory an
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the only browser that works reasonably well is IE7.
Have you tried updating that to IE8? You know, you can actually do that on XP...
</captain-obvious>
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get Chrome or Opera
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And don't say that IE9+ don't work on Windows XP. Just update to Win already 7 - XP is 10 years old! And if you really want to use XP, go for Chrome or Firefox.
Say that to my clients, not me. The only reason I'm still stuck on XP for so much of my work (mind you, running in a VM) is that they haven't approved anything higher than XP for all of their workstations except the ones that absolutely require 7 for some reason (most do have those). Mind you, I just use chrome in that environment, but all of those users at my clients' sites don't have that option--in fact, they're lucky if they can upgrade to a higher version of IE than what they have (some have upgraded t
Good Move (Score:2)
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I'm sorry. Even as a software developer i have stopped hitting the "upgrade" button on all things except for Opera, and Firefox. why? because every release just moves up more into confusing user interfaces, more tracking, or charging for services that were free with previous versions.
examples:
biggest one XCode. 3.5 was free 4.0 costs $6.00. granted $6 is nothing. i don't care... but why am i being charged for a product that was free? what is the incentive to upgrade? Well i needed to code and i didn't have
IE7 is the only real issue (Score:3)
Most browsers out there have pretty good update rates, driven by automatic updaters or a userbase made up of people who want the latest and greatest.
Firefox 3.5? 3.6 has been out for what, a year? 4.0 for several months. By the time this policy goes into effect, Firefox 5 will be out. And while Firefox users are slow to update compared to Chrome, Opera, etc. users, they're still a lot faster than IE users.
There's nothing (other than policy or preference) preventing anyone running IE7 from upgrading to IE8 at least. The minimum OS for IE7 was Windows XP, which can run IE8, and AFAIK there isn't a huge install base of IE7-specific web apps out there like there was with IE6 and ActiveX. And unlike the jump from IE6 to IE7, there isn't a huge change in user interface, so it should be a comfortable jump. People just need some encouragement to do it.
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There are a certain number of sites and apps that will work with IE6 and 7, but not with 8 or newer, at least yet. I support users who need access to at least two such webshites.
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There are a certain number of sites and apps that will work with IE6 and 7, but not with 8 or newer, at least yet. I support users who need access to at least two such webshites.
Ugh. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
My condolences.
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This is a compelling reason for Mozilla to drop this new versioning bullshit. If people start going to an N-1 that could very well mean that a browser that's been out for less than a year would suddenly be unusable on many sites and the new browser would be completely unusable on other ones.
OTOH it's not like the new versioning system was a good idea in other respects.
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Or perhaps you're simply retarded and making assumptions.
RHEL and Debian (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, 3.5.19 to be exact. It does ship Chromium 6, which is better, but if there's one area in which Debian's slight lag really bugs me is web browsing. Back when I was using Debian 64-bit, I got stuck with Firefox 3.0 for quite a long time. Mozilla doesn't provide a 64-bit binary. Neither does Opera. I did compile 3.5 eventually, but it took about an hour and I had to go through the whole process once a week, when a new bugfix would come out. It sucked.
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If it's that much of a hassle to run a 64 bit browser, why bother? I don't know about you but I get concerned if my browser's memory usage hits 2GB much less 4, I can't imagine it needs to do math on really big numbers very often, and the plugin situation is just easier to deal with. There's no real gain I see to a 64 bit browser, so I haven't ever figured out why people complain so much about Mozilla not releasing 64 bit binaries. Maybe it's different on other architectures, but on x86 and PPC there is
Google www services are shit (Score:3)
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I'm using the latest (11.11) Opera right now and Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Documents, and Reader all work fine, with no warnings or errors. Which services are broken?
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> I'm using the latest (11.11) Opera right now and Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Documents, and Reader all work fine, with no warnings or errors. Which services are broken?
Try Opera with Google Spreadsheets. I could never get that to work reliably in Opera. Specifically, open a Google Spreadsheet, then navigate down a few dozen cells. Does the highlight still line up with the cell?
However, I've never had a problem with Firefox (Linux/Win), Chrome (Linux/Win), Safari(Mac), or Camino(Mac).
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Smaller browser providers like Opera should be pretty happy about this policy actually, because it's really a move to increase reliance on standards, and drop all the grody hacked-up support for crazy old browsers.
As long as Opera maintains a good HTML5 implementation, they should be in a pretty good position.
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Since Opera's free, perhaps you should get off your butt and upgrade.
Stuck with IE7 (Score:2)
If Slashdot drops support for IE7 my productivity will be even higher.
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Poorly worded summary. (Score:2)
I don't blame 'em - it's bad enough to have to cross-develop for multiple browsers, cross-developing for current and past versions of older browsers literally doubles the difficulty involved - especially where an older version doesn't supply some critical functionality (like HTML5).
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They're only discontinuing support for OLDER versions of these browsers. The summary almost makes it seem like Google will only support Google Chrome.
Yes. I can see how the summary made this point unclear.
Google Incrementally Dropping Support For Older Browsers
Google announced on its blog that it is dropping support for Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari 3
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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.
Re:Do they care only about toys? (Score:5, Informative)
A couple of things:
* Not supported isn't the same thing as doesn't work
* Don't use Google if it is costing you significant time and money to do so
Firefox 3.5 is almost 2 years old now and is no longer supported by Mozilla. If you are using it, it's time to step up to at least 3.6.
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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.
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As you say, "almost 2 years old". So how often do you expect people to roll out major upgrades to something that works well? There is a world of difference between changing the browser on your home box and on aunt Lucy's one as well and having some extension cease to work and buttons being moved to other places and major testing of all software in a large organization to see if they still work after that change. The only way to make this manageable is to do major upgrades every X years or when there's ac
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It's a point release, not a full new version. There's not really significant testing needed. It's also a web browser which is not integrated with the system in any way, making it absolutely trivial that if a user manages to stumble upon something that's actually broken in any important way, rolling back is trivial.
I agree that some software can not be rapidly upgraded in a sane business environment, but this is not one of those cases. It's a very minor upgrade that's been out for 17 months and even super
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For most people, it's a really bad idea to be using an old browser that is no longer being updated. I think it's an excellent idea for big players like Google to be a little more proactive in getting people to keep their browser and plugins up to date. For most people, I recommend Chrome because of its auto-updating features. If you prefer Firefox, I would just install multiple versions of the browser and default to the newest one but still keep an older one available if you need it.
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I'm not going to argue that having well oiled, well supported piece of desktop software is a great way to do things. With the right arrangement of technologies it isn't even that hard to make a client-server pair. I'll leave the technology of choice to the implementer as well as the definition of hard.
Having said that, I develop a semi-internal website for a living at a multinational corporation that needs to be used by a few hundred different people ranging in age from 20 to 70 across 17 timezones on their
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Firefox 3.5 was released 2 years ago. 3.6 was released nearly 18 months ago. It's not every few months. It's been almost 18 months. If y
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Uhm, there is a vital thing about autoupdates: they should never, ever make gratuitous changes. Fix security bugs, data loss ones, major annoyances, perhaps minor typos that can't bring regressions. Bringing in a whole major release means your software is not stable.
I bet nobody saw that one coming... (Score:2)
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.
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Why should we have to support old versions of free software where in all cases the user would have had to go out of their way to disable automatic updates?
Any Firefox 3.5 user can update to 3.6. No system requirements changed and it's hard to believe anyone would have gone IE6-style and coded anything specifically to it. Same with IE7->IE8 and Safari 3->4.
If the users can upgrade at the press of a button and a problem is caused entirely by a bug in their outdated software, why should I fix it rather
Poor summary (Score:5, Informative)
As usual, the summary leaves out an important modifier -- this only applies to Google APPS, not Google.
From TFA:
Google will still support all older browsers on its search engine. It wouldn't make sense to discriminate there.
--
Psych Central
http://psychcentral.com/ [psychcentral.com]
With that kind of attitude... (Score:2)
I may have to start incrementally dropping my use of Google's products. You know, for one of their competitors' products. When their short-sightedness compels me to do so because they don't provide applications I want for the technology I have.
Careless (Score:2)
With the exception of their search engine and related functions, without which they would die, Google is one of the worst examples of software providers. They make programs with incomplete functionality, difficult and nonstandard interfaces, and other obvious flaws. It's "OOH SHINY" and not ready for serious work.
Google behaves as if it were run by amateurs, and breaking compatibility is just what is to be expected from such clowns.
Drop Firefox 4 by the end of the year? (Score:2)
LULZ (Score:3)
from TFA:
So if you are using Firefox and they stick to their announced release schedule, you will have to change to a new version of Firefox every 6 months.
eg.
v4 - now
v5 - in 3 months
v6 - in 6 months
v4 is then the third oldest version and no longer supported. 3 months later v5 is the third oldest and no longer supported. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
webmasters unite! (Score:2)
Why not show an annoying popup when an old browser is detected?
That will motivate users to upgrade.
And it will be especially effective if a lot of websites would play this trick. I'm actually surprised nobody successfully pulled off a campaign to do exactly this in the old IE6 days (actually not so long ago).
They already did (Score:3)
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Not supported != doesn't work
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https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/3.5_EOL [mozilla.org]
It's dead, Jim.
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FF5 is in beta3 and will be out in the next few months. At that point FF3.6, 4.0 and 5.0 will be newer than 3.5. Is it rational to support 4 versions of a browser? I say support no more than two versions or all major releases within the past 12 months, whichever is higher.
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Switch to Iceweasel? :)