A couple of days ago Google made rather a brave announcement regarding their ongoing support of older browser versions for their online applications.
We all hate testing in older browsers, IE6 I'm looking squarely in your direction, but surely there's a fine balance between trying to limit your testing plans and outright blocking a large portion of your customers. Google's plan is to support the current release of the major browsers, plus the last version. Normally I'd say this was a great plan, but with the fast turnaround on browsers this year alone it can easily spell problems for Windows users who plan on using Google's web applications. Google have already decided to stop supporting IE7 in a couple of months time and, with IE10 due out by the end of the year, they will be stopping support for IE8.
So what's the problem here? Sounds sensible enough from an application development standpoint, but when you realise that IE8 is the most popular browser on the web and the latest version of IE that is installable on Windows XP, the most popular OS by about 12% , you start to see a problem. They are also not explicitly supporting Opera, one of the most popular
mobile browsers; so good luck if you wanted to use GMail on your
mobile... it's a guessing game as to wether it'll still work later in
the year.
Sometimes we're lucky enough to work with a customer who's forward thinking enough to want IE6 gone as much as we do, but there are also a lot of Public sector organisations that we work with that have no choice but to continue to support IE6 and 7 thanks to legacy applications and a lack of funding to do upgrades for thousands of computers to Windows 7. I can't help but wonder if Google has really thought through the implications of their plans though
As of this morning, UK site owners have a year to work out how they intend to compy with the new EU legislation on the use of cookies on their websites. A couple of weeks ago the ICO released a set of guidelines on how best to meet the guidelines, but we found the document to be fairly vague in certain sections. Most people's initial reactions to this has been to have popups to approve/reject every cookie being set on a site, which could lead to a Mrs Doyle approach to the net.
Note: Video contains swearing
VIDEO
A good first step is to explain to your site users exactly what cookies you are using and why. Once you know what's being used you can then identify how to gain approval for their use.
It's interesting to note how the ICO themselves are dealing with the legislation as they are using Sitecore and Google Analytics, both of which automatically set cookies as soon as you load a page. The .Net session cookie set by Sitecore is deemed necessary to the running of the site which, according to their own guidelines, means you don't need to ask for permission. The Google cookies, while not necessary to the running of the site, are seen as a 3rd party inclusion to the site so they can pass the buck. Thankfully Google have set up the ability to opt out of all GA tracking via their site: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
I'm sure it's been used before, but I couldn't think of anything else.
Despite being a grey day, the views of London were pretty spectacular from the 28th floor yesterday when we joined Adobe for their Partner Conference. We got previews of their mobile offerings as well as their "One Adobe" ethos that links together all of their products going forward. We did find it funny that only the marketing presentations talked about "the Cloud"; the tech talks seemed to purposefully avoid the phrase.
Some of the morning's presentations went right over my head as they were full of marketing speak, but the more tech oriented talks in the afternoon made up for it somewhat, despite the hiccups. The highlight being the ability to write a mobile app and use Air to create different versions for all the current mobile operating systems in one shot. None of this faffing around with multiple languages; Adobe seems to have it covered.
