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
