Google Apps dropping support for older browsers | Hacker News Reader

Google Apps dropping support for older browsers

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104 pointsspaetzel44 comments

Sad to see they don't even mention Opera. I don't use it, but it should run google apps without problems.

Also i know very big companies that still use IE6, sadly. For those people stuck without admin access and ancient browsers: Give Firefox Portable a try, it saved my day last week ;)

Apart from that, go google go! I like this move and more websites should just do this..

Didn't the Google team also make Chrome now usable/installable without Admin rights?

Yes, by default in Windows it installs to the user's "Application Data" folder instead of the system-wide "Program Files".

That was Chrome Frame, the Internet Explorer plugin that enables chrome rendering in IE.

Chrome itself can be installed without admin rights, I remember using that on a University pc to view a flash video with the embedded plugin.

We deal with a large enterprise that uses old versions of IE and whenever our support team encounters one we just upgrade them to Chrome. Sadly we can't recommend any other browser since they all require admin access for some reason.

You can get Firefox and Opera in portable versions that don't require admin rights.

Don't make things so complicated!

If you want to install Firefox, get the normal Firefox download, and install it on your desktop (i.e. choose a path which you have write access to)

You only need Admin rights to install system wide or overwrite system binaries.

This works if USB devices haven't been locked down by some kind of IT policy.

While portable apps are promoted for and usually installed on USB drives, they can also be installed on local disks as well, and they don't require admin privileges to do so (from my experience).

I was not aware of that. Thanks! I guess the portable aspect is not quite perfect for their description though?

My complaint exactly. I use Opera almost exclusively and it deserves a much larger market share than it has...

I was using Opera extensively for the past year - then recently it started nagging me to turn on Turbo (which allows Opera to track your traffic), so when I switched systems I didn't install it on the new one - just FireFox and IE9. Although there are features of Opera I miss, I like the various privacy plugins available on Firefox a hell of a lot more than what passes for an equivalent on Opera. Although there a lots of Opera features I like, it just seemed that suck was increasingly creeping into it. I kept feeling like Opera had begun presenting popups to get me to change my settings.

Nope, you just had it set to auto, which makes it warn you about slow connections. I set it to off when I saw the first popup and I've never seen it since. They're pretty good about being nonintrusive and nice.

I did notice they did not say they were dropping Opera support. I think it's reasonable for them to not spend a large amount of time fixing minor bugs for a browser with 2% market share.

Isn't this the point of web standards? Things should generally "just work" in Opera if they work in those other modern browsers.

Google do not so much forget about Opera as deliberately work against it.

They are well aware of its existence.

I can only assume they want people to migrate to Chrome.

Dropping support for older browsers shows why Google Apps will continue to struggle against Microsoft products for government contracts such as was the case recently in San Francisco. Large organizations get locked into legacy OS's for many reasons - example government agencies who bought and rely on geospatial data in Autodesk Mapguide format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapguide

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&...

And yes that is a plug-in for Netscape that is still available!

Luckily Google has decided that the entire rest of the world doesn't have to wait for every bureaucracy to upgrade their antiquated systems in order to make progress.

At this point MS want IE6 (and 7) to die as much as everyone else does, as it has become a source of embarrassment.

Even MS's own online office applications don't support IE6 and have not done so since the back end of 2009 (see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officewebapps/archive/2009/08/05/985... for confirmation). Not supporting IE8 would be a problem (a number of our banking clients are in the process of transitioning away from IE6, but unfortunately only onto IE8 and I assume many government bodies are in a similar position) which is possibly why Google have drawn the line there, but if not supporting IE6 is an issue then Microsoft's online products will be affected as much as Google's. IE7 is pretty much moot in my experience: I don't know of any environment that upgraded to 7 which stuck with it, those that stuck with IE6 are either still stuck there or are upgrading to 8 or something more modern and those who moved to 7 have moved again.

Well then they will just have to unlock themself - we can't wait for the slow people to catch up if we are ever to get close to the future.

Personally I was hoping that they would remove the support from the search site, which may yet happen.

This is damned good. If organisations continue transitioning, hopefully it'll up the pressure to keep updating browser versions and internal resources.

Yes, this strikes me as an important step toward the beginning of the end of having to design for archaic browsers. The ball just needs a nudge and it'll get rolling, the momentum of it just-being-the-way-it-ought-to-be behind it.

Interesting. These aren't really what most people would consider older browsers.

It looks like two years is their support cutoff, based on when FF 3.5 came out.

I don't think their cutoff date is as important as the browsers they cut off. IE6/7 are a pain to support and test. Maybe Google figures that people that far behind are going to stay with what they have/know (e.g, Microsoft Office), and that may not be a bad bet.

The linked article says that it is the two last major releases.

Why that does not mean FF 4 and 3, I don't get.

3.6 is considered a major release.

Google must consider the 'current' major version of Firefox 5, which will be released soon (maybe in time for the enforcing of this new plan?).

You know sometimes it really annoys me that I work somewhere that only supports IE7. Good thing that jobs thread came up today.

Count yourself lucky. Amongst our enterprise-level customers, IE6 (yes, 6, you read that right) is still the majority of page hits.

It might be worth mentioning how IE 6 is still there. IE 6 is the only version that ever came with Windows XP and 2003 install images, which many many corps still use. And remember that the average lifetime of a Windows installation on a corporate desktop is actually pretty short, getting wiped and re-imaged frequently as people leave or machines are moved around or some Outlook error pops up and the IT guy re-images because that's faster than digging in to fix it. So IE 6 comes out of the reinstallation casket all the time.

It's not that corps are scared of upgrading, it's just not worthwhile from a cost-benefit standpoint to download and install IE 8 on every single machine on every reinstall. Their users that want IE 8 or Firefox will go get it; the users that don't know what a browser version is never know that they're missing anything. IE 6 will only go away when Windows XP does.

FWIW, I intentionally keep IE 6 on my work machine (not a big corp, but we sell to them) for testing, and use Opera for real browsing.

> FWIW, I intentionally keep IE 6 on my work machine (not a big corp, but we sell to them) for testing

Why not use Microsoft's ie VPC images? http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...

"In order to help web designers and web developers test their websites in older versions of Internet Explorer, we've provided the following VHD with Windows set up with the specified version of Internet Explorer. The images are patched with the latest security updates and are otherwise clean installs of the operating system with very few modifications."

Also works with VirtualBox on linux / mac: http://shapeshed.com/journal/testing_with_ie6_ie7_and_ie8_on...

You do not even need a Windows license:

"Note: You may be required to activate the OS as the product key has been deactivated. This is the expected behavior. The VHDs will not pass genuine validation. Immediately after you start the Windows 7 or Windows Vista images they will request to be activated. You can cancel the request and it will login to the desktop. You can activate up to two “rearms” (type slmgr –rearm at the command prompt) which will extend the trial for another 30 days each time OR simply shutdown the VPC image and discard the changes you’ve made from undo disks to reset the image back to its initial state. By doing either of these methods, you can technically have a base image which never expires although you will never be able to permanently save any changes on these images for longer than 90 days."

Hopefully moves like this from big names like Google will help convince these enterprise companies to make the switch.

Wait, who am I kidding, that's just wishful thinking.

Indeed, many enterprises such as the one I work for do not care about Google apps etc.. not working since they usually cater their browser versions towards in-house software development.

Enterprises like to centralize everything then they get trapped into the trap that they set for themselves. Nature and people are decentralized, technology should be the same. Imagine if there was only one tree responsible for the oxygen on Earth. Let people manage their own desktop environments already!

the current and prior major release of Chrome...

Ouch! that means Chrome versions[0] older than March 2011 won't be supported?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Release_history

Which isn't that big of a deal. Take a look at Chrome's upgrade curves, compared to the other browsers:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/04/08/the-modern-browser-wars-...

For Chrome, Google is basically saying "we push updates, you better take them or you can use some other browser".

I had ranted about Chromebooks not being a good deal pricewise (which I still claim). But a friend of mine, who heads IT for a large enterprise, noted the issue wasn't up-front acquisition cost. But that Google seems to want to run IT in the cloud and locally. He wasn't willing to take updates to browsers on Google's schedule unless Google was willing to own making all of their LoB apps work too.

Very glad to see them dropping the older browsers. Hopefully more web companies will follow giving legacy companies impetus to upgrade.

Narrowing their list of modern browsers so tightly is a little worrying though, any standards supporting browser (opera?) should be considered, otherwise they could be enforcing a cartel of current browsers.

Well if Microsoft feels threatened by Google Apps, they know what to do: release IE10 quick smart and watch the entire corporate and government world suddenly not be potential customers of Google any more as Google drops support for IE8 (and hence Windows XP).

Why are big enterprises so resistant to change browsers?

Often they have a number of in-house intranet applications that rely on IE6 quirks. So there is a large cost associated with testing and upgrading their legacy applications.

This is definitely the case in a large number of the major UK banks.

As someone building software used by these places- it is frustrating to have to support IE6, but there is a lot of opportunity here, because a lot of developers/companies can't be bothered to make their products IE6 compatible.

This is great.

wohoo :)

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