Google Dropping Support For Older Browsers

Community
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Or are stuck on dialup and flat out can’t afford it. People often lose sight of the fact that in America we have massive areas where a high speed connection is 768/128 that runs $100/mo or more… and area’s where 33.6 dialup is still a good day – take Coos County here in New hampshire. I travel 80 miles north and there is no such thing as broadband! The Dakota’s, most of the deep Appalachians and Rockies – we’re talking large swaths where the only thing you might be able to get for broadband is the ridiculously overpriced “hughes-net” rubbish.

Downloading even a modern browser is impractical at those speeds.

You also have the poor. Not everyone can afford to drop a grand or two every three years – I know a lot of people still using Windows 98 boxes… Hell at a friend of mine’s work she’s on a Win98 machine that wipes itself nightly back to just IE6 and hyperterminal – the latter of which is still used to connect into their client database on a bloody PDP-11. “It works, why spend money we don’t have to?”. (I’m more than aware of this as I’m the only person in town qualified to SERVICE one of those)

Stevie is also quite correct in pointing out corporate users. Microsoft did something really innovative with Trident when they released IE 5 – they documented the entire engine API and allowed anyone to use it to build their software – letting you leverage HTML and CSS to build your application UI’s… and I have to laugh at the FLOSS whackjobs who badmouthed that while promoting the use of XUL runner; or how “HTML behaving as full desktop applications” is some miraculous new idea for IE 10.

MANY of the in-house crapplets tossed together with Trident, most of them written in Visual Basic, break if you so much as THINK about upgrading to a newer IE and don’t work in other browsers. Some of them even break if those other browsers steal the default program status. We’re talking ten and twelve year old software that you tell the boss “we need to update it” they’re going to ask “why, it’s working just fine with the software we have.”

… and saying “Well, some web developers are too lazy to support it and want to use a bunch of fancy bells, whistles and gee ain’t it neat animooted effects that have nothing to do with content delivery” isn’t going to fly as an answer! Frankly that is what it boils down to in many cases as if people would pull their damned heads out of 1998’s backside, practicing separation of presentation from content, semantic markup, built the sites using progressive enhancement with accessibility in mind from the start, they wouldn’t have these issues of at least making the pages WORK in legacy IE. If you build using “progressive enhancement” should said bells, whistles and “gee aint it neat” bull are unavailable the site gets “graceful degradation”!

They don’t have to be pixel perfect, they don’t have to have all those fancy bells and whistles – but they should still be at least usable – WITHOUT “HTML 5 shim” idiocy, WITHOUT “IE conditional comments” bloating out the markup to cover up bad site-building methodologies, and without any real extra effort on building the site!!!

But of course people will just continue sleazing out code as fast and half-assed as possible who cares if it works anywhere but their pet browser at their pet resolution and screen size, much less how much it ends up costing in the long term for hosting, loss of potential clients via a high bounce rate, needlessly complex code that’s impossible to maintain much less debug, etc, etc, etc…

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My feelings are mixed. I appreciate the need to leave deprecated and browser-specific markup behind, but I wonder whether Google will support Lynx, a text-only browser that’s very useful for the blind – or Classilla and iCab, which are useful for people keeping alive those classic (pre-OS X) Macs? Too few people already are practicing progressive enhancement, but if Google keeps accessibility in mind while making this move I will be pleased.

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I agree with deathshadow - google is becoming an example of bad coding practices and their requirement for newest browsers is more an indication of laziness than real problems with older technology. I don’t believe they are so poor that they cannot afford to support older browsers. If they just rejected IE 6 I could understand - I wouldn’t expect 11-year old technology to be supported. But if they are dropping IE 7 and FF 3.5 it sounds like they are lazy, ignorant or on some mission to reject old browsers. Actually, the last one could be true - maybe they’ve figured out that the more they push people to get rid of old browsers the better their odds of getting them to download Chrome that they so agressively advertise.

And google not only rejects old browsers. For example, in Seamonkey 2.0 (based on FF 3.5) the live search-as-you-type doesn’t work on the main google page. Neither works their ‘improved’ image result pages. They fall back to the old plain html versions. And it’s enough to spoof UA string saying I am firefox and all those features work perfectly. Not only do they use browser sniffing all over the place but they also fail to do it right. And what about Opera?

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It’s not laziness…it’s just not cost effective to hack in features for older browsers (and/or lesser-used browsers), like IE 5.5 and 6. While on the other hand, these features are built-in and readily available in newer browsers. I can spend a couple hours on a design and have it work perfectly in firefox, chrome, safari, and opera…but IE always needs some massaging, and I often spend up to a few days working out the kinks and bringing things up to par because of missing browser features or non-standardized standards.

Sorry, it’s just not worth my time to support older browsers–especially for browsers with their own quirky standards and falling adoption rates. When the development time to support severely outdated browsers with a low usage rate is 400 times more than what 80% of what the rest of the web surfers use, it really isn’t cost effective for anyone.

But, if your primary audience is composed of IE6 users, then (sigh) you’ll have to accommodate them.

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I said I don’t mind IE6 - there must come a point where support has to be dropped. I’m talking about IE7, FF 3.5, etc. - these browsers are not that old and making sure a site is usable in them, without all bells and whistles, is not such hard work. I think it’s too soon for these ones to be dropped completely.

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Whats the point? What about people who want to use the old browsers?

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On the same subject, no one has mentioned the fact that omitting what may be useless markup will save a company like Google thousands on bandwidth costs. Yes, it’s crappy coding practices, but the guys at Google aren’t stupid. I bet they know the specs inside and out and that these decisions are made not just with the web in mind, but their bottom line.

Also, no one has mentioned that most news outlets are carrying what I feel is a sensationalist headline. Yes, Google are the company that are dropping IE6 support, but only on a few of their apps. The search engine will likely continue to support old browsers, as well their ad platforms.

In my eyes, if you’ve not dropped IE6 already you’re well behind the times. I’m already considering dropping support for IE7.

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Google has a lightwieght html only option so you don’t need to view it in all text. I don’t give a **** about this news because I will always have the latest browser :smiley:

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Hi,

I know that it’s not good for workplace.

It will also effect work out put

Thanks
cheshpattinson

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Nah, it’ll only push the lazy IT people to upgrade browsers, that’s all.

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i don’t think it will have any bad impact on user’s end, as sometimes to provide quality product for a greater user base we need to compensate few odd users.

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See, to me that’s just plain lazy. Sure, there’s all sort of gee ain’t it neat new stuff – but really if you can’t make a page that works all the way back to IE6… and I’m talking works, NOT pixel perfect with every single gee-whiz newtech, you probably aren’t writing accessible code, semantic code, relying on RECOMMENDATIONS instead of DRAFT, practicing separation of presentation from content, or the dozen other things that make supporting IE moronically simple once you master “OH NOES” not using width/height the same time as padding/border the same direction, not using comments in a manner that causes rendering bugs in IE and some versions of FF, Not slapping classes on everything for no good reason, and the handful of other things that if you do from the start should make supporting back to even IE 5.5 EASY… IDIOTICALLY SIMPLE!!! Doesn’t have to be pixel perfect, but it should at least WORK.

… and in fact, failing to use such practices may in fact miss the POINT of HTML in the first place. But then, I say the same thing about HTML 3.2 and HTML 5 – they missed the point compared to HTML 2 and HTML 4 strict. It’s like the odd numbered ones are for people who don’t get it and even numbered are for people who do… Be interesting the next two or three decades seeing if the pattern holds… just how much of the bloated useless non-semantic being sold as semantic bull gets cut away in HTML 6 just like 4 STRICT was to 3.2… and of course 6 Tranny that will be to HTML 5 as 4 Tranny is to 3.2 – basically just so the people who are keeping their heads wedged up 1998’s backside can stay there.

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It is really appreciated making the Internet users to use Google creations with their newly updated browsers and it is really notable that some not supported in older browsers. For Internet users, it is really good being up to date with the browsers to get more advantages and access more number of features. But, not everyone can able to be up to date and some many intend to use older browsers. At present, i’m using Mozilla 5.0.

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You’re using the assumption that we’re not writing code to standards and that it flat-out doesn’t work with IE6. All of our code validates, and it probably works in IE6. The reason we don’t support it is because there simply aren’t enough people using it to make it worthwhile. We get more users browsing our sites using the PS3 than with IE6. Does this mean that we should get a PS3 in the office to see if our sites work on it? We have no reason to support IE6, nor should we. Hell, if a client asks for their site to support IE6 we charge extra; a now common practice amongst most digital agencies.

To be frank, if you’re working on company time then spending extra time to make a site work in IE6 is wasted money. Why should we support IE6 anyway, why not support IE5? There are people that still use it (2 in the past year for us, and they may have been us playing in a VM). Where should we draw the line?

You’re evangelising the spec far too much, when in reality everyone wants IE6 to die a horrible death. Even Microsoft want it gone, although only because it will result in more people buying Windows 7 and removing the horrible reputation their browsers now hold. As far as I am concerned IE6 isn’t a browser, it’s a tool that only continues to exist because of legacy corporate software.

It’s hardly beyond anyone’s ability to write slightly different CSS to handle IE6, but we shouldn’t have to. I am more than happy to ditch IE6 and IE7 if it means we’ll get an extra half hour out of the day to spend working on back-end development. It annoys me to no end that, in this day and age, we’re left to support FOUR versions of IE that lack basic features found in Firefox or Chrome.

A fun note; on one of our sites we cleared out all CSS and provided an extremely basic stylesheet for IE6 to style the text a bit nicer. Our form fill-ins increased dramatically.

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That may be an indication you might want to try that for everyone else, not just IE6 users.

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I don’t have a big problem with that, because the essential functionality (being able to carry out a search) still works. The live search-as-you-type is an additional enhancement that may or may not work depending on what browser you use, but that doesn’t matter so much, because if it doesn’t work you haven’t lost any essential functionality.

Personally I’m very happy that live search-as-you-type doesn’t work in Opera because I find it irritating as heck.

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Good step taken by Google to motivate and forcing the people to come toward the new web browsers.Google chrome is best in all…It will help all those companies to keep on moving towards the new web browsers so that they can keep continue their work on Google docs etc…!!!

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Moving to newer versions always has benefits… usually it has something to do with security and performance concerns.

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Well its kinda big news but whatever its not gonna effect any of my work I don’t use outdated browser anymore… Thanks

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Which is how ALL such “enhancements” should be built to work; frankly I wish there was a way to turn OFF suck enhancements more reliably – especially bandwidth hogging annoying crap like that “search as you type”… which they JUST made start working in Opera and I hate it. Thankfully for most of my searches I just do it in the address bar anyways.

Wasn’t that one of the things that flushed “ask” down the toilet? Guess even old mistakes are new.