Google Ends Internet Explorer 9 Support In Google Apps 199
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."
Re:Walled Garden (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, at some point recentyish Google crossed into completely unlikable territory. While that might drive technically adept people away, their momentum and existing user base can be mined for as much money as possible in the meantime. 10 years ago google was awesome. Today, I wouldn't bat an eye if they got wiped from the face of the planet.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:We're stuck on 9 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:0, Insightful)
Incompetent for using a unified management system for all of their duties?
In business land that's called efficient.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:2, Insightful)
What do security zones actually do to help you, except allow programmers to get away with abysmally sloppy design within the confines of your "local intranet"? IE contains tons of so-called "security" in order to plaster over crap that should have been handled properly elsewhere. Oh, and do your WPAD over DNS if you really think you need that over a transparent proxy.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:3, Insightful)
If it does not do what you need then, yes.
Believing the built in one is the only one, yes. Not finding a solution to a business need, yes. All of those would make you incompetent.
Re:We're stuck on 9 (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the polite way to say "Google doesn't want you as a customer"?
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:2, Insightful)
This is pretty much the underlying case, yes. However I would add to this: additional complexity in your environment is bad, and should be avoided if possible.
Whether you decide to standardize on Linux + Firefox or Windows + IE or whatever your platform is - keep the absolute minimum of items required to do the job you need it to do.
Every additional item you add to your platform is another round of testing, another set of patch maintenance, another threat surface to secure, etc. Even if the program is FREE, supporting it will cost you time and therefore money.
In my case, for example (and I suspect we are not unusual as far as enterprise customers go) we have to deal with several applications (both inside and outside of the company) which are supported in IE, and actually break in Chrome or Firefox. We have zero business applications which we can not make work in IE, so for us it is a no brainer.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:2, Insightful)
we have webapps that for obvious reasons do not run on IE
For what obvious reasons would you be referring? IE9 and especially IE10/11 are easily as standards compliant for HTML5 and CSS3+ as Firefox is (with the possible exception of transitions not working as specified... but who uses those for business apps?)
It's clear that you're just a typical /. anti-MS hater, there's no need for you to couch that in erroneous / inaccurate technical double-speak The fact that you espouse looking for and using 3rd party applications to redundantly apply functions that already exist within the OS/vendor stack aptly demonstrates that your animosity exceeds your common sense...
-AC
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:2, Insightful)
You're not really a Google customer, you're the product.