Saturday, 15 September 2012 14:10

Google Apps says farewell to IE8

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Today the Google apps team officially announced that their service will no longer support Internet Explorer 8 or any previous version of IE. This will influence a wide range of institutions that use Google's service and hopefully for Google they will update their workstations in time to be able to continue to use it. This decision will start on November 15th, which is after the launch of Internet Explorer 10.

“As we announced last year, we support the latest version of Google Chrome (which automatically updates whenever it detects that a new version of the browser is available) as well as the current and prior major release of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version of one of these browsers is released, we begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.” the Google team stated. We can see that this is a standard procedure, and that they had constant updating in mind when they created their Chrome browser.
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Google also said that “Internet Explorer 10 launches on 10/26/2012, and as a result, we will discontinue support for Internet Explorer 8 shortly afterwards, on 11/15/2012. After this date users accessing Google Apps services using Internet Explorer 8 will see a message recommending that they upgrade their browser.” So if you are using Google Apps and still have Internet Explorer 8, or an even older version, it is time to update. Even if you hate doing this maybe you should really consider moving to another browser, instead of staying on “the best browser for downloading other browser”.

[Ed – The browser wars are very interesting in that they all claim to be faster or better while none of them really are. They ALL have their security and performance issues. Firefox has been having issues with Flash while Chrome has privacy and security problems all on their own. Safari and IE are two that typically allow plug-ins to bypass security with elevated privilege so they also have their problems. Google is in an interesting position because they do have their own browser. We have run into a couple of items that would not let us access them without using Chrome (Google Currents was one). They could end up being in the same position that Microsoft was with IE a few years before if they are not careful about some of these limitations. In the end upgrading an online service to remove support for browsers that are no longer receiving updates from the developer is a good thing. Often it has nothing to do with performance, but is all about security. To be honest any company that will not update their systems as when new browsers (with updated security) come out have a few problems all on their own.]

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