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."
We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:2, Informative)
Not that anyone uses IE except for when they have to
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Informative)
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Informative)
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Are you also allowed to access your private Gmail account?
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Time to switch to Office 365 then.
They value our time and costs it takes after millions to get IE 8 just year. WTF
Google wont have customers anymore at this rate. The 22 year old programmers there have never worked in a production environment. Google doesnt count as they money to burn and its not labeled a cost center
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 IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Interesting)
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And if you want to use Google's app's you'll need IE10 or a modern browser. It goes both ways.
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Chrome has (or at least had last time I looked) an 'enterprise' download that could be managed via Group Policy and do updates on a centralised schedule.
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Because it's far easier to deploy a web app than an native app. You only need to update it in one place and as long as the user has the right browser they can access it from wherever. This is of course completely screwed by the arrival of tablets but then that's what happens when monopolies go unpunished.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Interesting)
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You run those things via Remote Desktop or use multiple IE installs. I know those suck, but they suck less than using IE8 everywhere.
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Nah, we just blocked IE9 from the couple of PCs that need it. Pretty much everything is on Win7 x64/IE9 at the moment, testing IE11/Win8.1 at the moment as the PHBs are wanting to "run office on my tablet" (excel mostly, and numbers won't do it). Looked into doing it with View + iPad, but it obviously wont work without connectivity. So currently evaluating Windows tablets. Possibly something like a Lenovo Helix which can replace their laptop as well.
Interesting times, I really do wish for the day whe
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Even businessland has largely abandoned IE6 in most of the world... the marketshare of IE6 in North America is 0.2%. China is the only country with any significant use of IE6.
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Right on the nose! Coming to you live from IE8 ! I can't wait to get back to my Firefox machine. It is only stuck on FF ESR 17
Between ultra conservative policies and massive filtering, I'm surprised I can even see /. let alone get it to work.
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But firefox increases the version number every week, so you're only ten weeks behind!
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:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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If you need gmail guess what you do?
It depends on what your company needs. In mine not providing firefox and all those addons would lead me to the unemployment line.
Securing IE is easy if you are not using it. Point it to a proxy that does not exist.
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We don't use gmail.
Anytime you use email that is a reality. Either from the scanning hardware you use, or service to outside hosting.
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I'm not saying that this is really comparable to IE's group policy settings, but it's actually possible to lock down Firefox through GP without any add-ons. Firefox can take configuration defaults and lockdown instructions from two files placed in the same folder as the executable. At that point it's a simple matter of writing the files and then deploying them using GP or even a login script.
Somewhat harder than IE, but definitely not a non-starter.
You can actually lock down anything that is configurable fr
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So now I am relying on a login script to be run to push any changes, which may or may not happen if the user does the typical thing of powering up their laptop, logging in, realizing they forgot to plug the lan cable in and then plugging into the network.
And it is still 2x the work, because IE needs to be configured/secured irrespective of whether it is the default browser because it is installed on every box.
And now I need to test all of our apps against 2 browsers, and every support call related to b
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Informative)
You don't need to use a login script. GP supports pushing files to client machines seamlessly and natively. It's also less than twice the work, because generally Firefox is going to be their "general" web browser, not the one they use for the intranet. You just need to configure some defaults, and possibly force a proxy or something like that.
The complexity is also not needless. Giving your users a choice of browser is a good thing, not necessarily a waste.
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Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Informative)
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Google's arrogance with this stuff is pushing me to finally leave gmail for outlook.com. As much as the same sort or arrogance annoys me with Windows 8, somehow outlook.com has escaped the terrors of "designers" and is the simple, clean UI that gmail was 10 years ago.
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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 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.
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You obviously have to cater for your own users, but if they really are running into work-related sites that don't work on recent versions of IE with any regularity, your case is an outlier.
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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 i
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Sure but your use case is not everyones use case.
Heck, we have a department that runs IE and Firefox for the dumbest reason ever: They need two separate browser sessions and having two copies of any one browser open at a time confused them. Yes, we changed the title bar, and colors and anything else you can imagine. They literally were confused because they look similar.
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Ahem, brother.
We even for a lark tried two firefox sessions and made massive changes, like different color schemes. They still claimed it was confusing. How can you confuse the windows that are numbered and one is bright pink the other green?
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30 people? Half of them female?
We tried other garish colors as well. None were acceptable. They simply could not tell the difference they claimed. Only having different looking browsers would do.
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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.)
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Chrome less so, at least they provide ADM templates. But you still need to deal with automatic updates breaking your certification process (again, IE = easy via WSUS) and the fact that IE is already there. If there is a BUSINESS NEED for Google apps, then maybe the sensible thing to do is to run IE 10 for those users who need it. If there is no business need for an app that WILL NOT RUN in IEx then there's very little sense in deploying an additional browser.
And no, you can't just secure IE by pointin
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Yes I have a valid business case. Preventing automatic updates is not hard.
You can't secure IE or Office by that metric at all. Just today I read about another zero day using tiffs.
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To clarify, we have webapps that for obvious reasons do not run on IE. It was cheaper to make firefox work for us than to make all the IE needed workarounds.
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Good for you. however I would wager that your case is pretty atypical vs. the rest of the business world. Any reason you didn't go for chrome-frame instead?
Zero days aren't exclusive to IE.
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We started this a long time ago. Chrome was not an option then. It only came out in 2008.
Nope, but IE has more than its fair share.
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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
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IE8 is not is it?
IE10/11 I will grant you are fine, but even IE9 is not.
It is clear you are just an idiot. I might hate MS, but their AD management tools are first rate, if you never go outside their little world. Sometimes you have to travel off the reservation.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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Security zones allow you to lock the browser down tighter for all sites that are not trusted. Chrome and Firefox do not have anywhere near the flexibility in terms of per-zone or per-site configuration that IE does.
And like it or not, business are built on, and depend on shitty web apps. Both shitty web apps that are written in house, shitty web apps that are used in house, and shitty web apps that are required to interact with third parties that you have zero control over and were not selected based o
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not just talking about apps within my walls. Exhibit a: we are a mining contractor, and we need to fly staff to and from remote sites. A number of our clients use a min-site management system that does accomation bookings, flight bookings, etc. To get on/off site we need to use it. It runs in IE only.
We don't use it, we don't get on site. We don't get on site, we don't earn any money.
It's not our app. We have no control over it and no ability to make decisions regarding it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for web standards and ripping out broken crap, but you don't always have a choice, and you play the hand you're dealt.
Re:We're stuck on IE 6 or 8 here in business land (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Now I cam curious: could you expand on that? What else does one disable/enable on different security zones?
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Well, (Score:5, Funny)
why do IE9 need any "special support" at all? standards-incompatible browser?
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Google apps doesn't want to support obsolete software. Microsoft doesn't want to support obsolete software. Run Firefox or Opera (I think Chrome still supports XP as well).
When Firefox and others stop supporting XP, and people find that XP no longer meets their needs, they will upgrade.
Tough shit, XP is 12 years old. Get over it.
Your corporation still runs XP as many of your apps are not compatable with newer versions and you also use Google Apps in the workplace? Sucks to be you - you have known for years
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It doesn't need special support necessarily. It's just a way for a company to officially say that they are discontinuing support for that browser to guarantee that it works. You still may be able to use the previous version to the full app's potential, but if you do have a problem, do go crying to Google about it.
The exact same policy that exists for IE exists for Firefox and Safari as well. They support the current and second most recent version, and discontinue the 3rd most recent. It's less of a big d
Walled Garden (Score:2, Interesting)
Use our apps. Best with Chrome...
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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.
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They've done a couple of out of character things lately (youtube play button signing people up for Google+, and XMPP support), but I don't think dropping support for a browser that doesn't follow standards is particularly bad. I think they're still a lesser evil than any of their competitors in most markets. I'm not saying that it's a high bar or anything ...
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IE 9 is not very far from standards compliance, in any sort of pragmatic sense. I usually don't have to worry about CSS/javascript issues causing problems anymore when I develop code for websites(because I ignore IE 7 and before).
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Yeah, I guess the 2-3 extra lines to support XMLHttpRequest on i.e. are a pain. It just doesn't seem like something to throw up your arms and give up on, like say the box model was in IE 6.
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It's more than 2-3 extra lines. IE8 and IE9 don't have XHR2, so you have to use the XDomainRequest ActiveX control, which behaves differently, doesn't support anything other than GET and POST, and is riddled with silly bugs like, "if the progress handler isn't set, requests won't be processed at all in IE9, with no errors."
Never mind the fact that the XHR object in IE8/9 is broken as all hell.
Re:Walled Garden (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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,
the only thing obvious here is that firefox is not following the w3c standard.
since I can't force all my volunteers to use a particular browser.
you dont have to force developers to fix an issue but they are much more likely to oblige if you offer them money in return for their services. now if only there was a place where you could do such a thing. [bountysource.com]
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the only thing obvious here is that firefox is not following the w3c standard.
Strong claim - which one would that be?
they are much more likely to oblige if you offer them money in return for their services
Google Apps devs are participating?
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Are you referring to this issue [mozilla.org]? It seems to me that the problem is caused by Firefox making some text disproportionately big compared with other text due to its minimum font size settings, and you can fix the problem by changing Firefox's settings to not interfere with the font size.
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Interesting, I'll have to check it out. The complaints I was seeing were on the Google product forums, vs. mozilla.org. The trick here is that half of my volunteers are retirees. The per-site minimum font size extension mentioned on that page will be worth looking at.
Re:Walled Garden (Score:5, Informative)
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 [blogspot.co.uk]. 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.
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only supporting standards compliant browsers is NOT a walled garden because anyone can implement a working browser as it's well defined and spec'd out standard with compliance tests and all. dont want to follow the agreed upon standard? fine but dont come back with crocodile tears. no browser (not even Chrome) should have any exceptions made for their bad behavior. it's a standard, not a suggestion.
We're stuck on 9 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:We're stuck on 9 (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the polite way to say "Google doesn't want you as a customer"?
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> "Google doesn't want you as a customer if supporting your old browser costs more than the revenue you bring in"?
FTFY
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You might as well wait for RHEL 7 by now.
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We're stuck on 9
incorrect! your firm is simply refusing to upgrade. there is a BIG difference.
No bueno (Score:2)
We've got a number of programs and a few outside websites that require IE9 or older. Good thing that we're cool with letting our users have Firefox and Chrome, though some of them really like IE and would rather use that instead.
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IE 9 requires at least Vista. Making IE 10 the requirement means you can't even use Vista, you have to have at least Windows 7 (or switch browsers).
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Well, at least Chrome will work on XP for another couple of years: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/17/0311247/ [slashdot.org]
And yet... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:IE 9? (Score:4, Informative)
They're only the latest version if you're on a recent version of Windows. Many people aren't.
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Must one buy each Windows OS as it is released? (Score:2)
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In what world do they live?
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Not really [statcounter.com].
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As a web developer, I can only heartily support any effort to push people away from Google. YMMV, but I don't think they are a net positive contributor to the industry for either developers or users any more. I think they are more running on momentum earned from doing some good/useful things a few years ago than they are doing new good/useful things today.
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Unfortunately, many of these "standards-compliant" features aren't really standardised in any meaningful way yet. Of those that are, the quality of implementation across browsers is variable.
Chrome is very good at ticking more boxes than other browsers or winning on cute test pages, but personally I'd rather they fix the numerous layout bugs they seem to have when everyday features interact, or sort out the quality of their text rendering, or improve the performance of SVGs. There's little value in implemen
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I guess I just don't understand this entire web app thing. I don't WANT my stuff stored and running on the Internet, and I have clients that are absolutely nothing but google apps. Having to upgrade my computer to read their stuff (they send links--not attachments--requiring a login to look at what they sent me in email -- what is that?)
It's pretty simple, really - they're externalizing their IT costs onto you, and other people they work with. Sorry there's not a happy answer.
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Or you could upgrade to FireFox, Opera, Chrome or some other browser.
This is also a viable option for anybody currently stuck on IE10 or soon to be stuck on IE11.