The only way the web can move forward is if we stop supporting archaic browsers that can't support half the features CSS3 and HTML5 have to offer. Google are the only company game enough to make such a move, they should be praised for this. They've consistently helped push the web forward, IE10 is exciting and a decent version of Internet Explorer, I can't wait until I can build for IE10+
Websockets, HTML5 File API, FileReader API, XMLHttpRequest 2, Web Workers, IndexedDB, requestAnimationFrame, JS Typed Arrays, PageVisibility and a whole list of other awesome things that IE10+ supports. I'm drooling thinking of all of these new API's I soon will be able to use in my web applications without needing shims.
"The policy is not useful for Internet Explorer, which doesn't update automatically and has limited OS support."
First point is wrong, from IE 11 the default is automatic updates.
The second point is an unusual way to phrase it...
On the overall topic, I find this strange. Google Docs seems to make efforts to target Microsoft Office users by writing importers for what are very complex formats. It then pretty much cuts itself off from most medium and larger Microsoft based companies, very few of which, in my experience, are up to IE 10.
I wonder if this says something about them really targeting the small, but fastest growing companies and anything really big is nice, but not the priority.
That description is pretty accurate. 58% of the market is using Internet Explorer currently. Of Internet Explorer users, the breakdown by version is:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 11.0: 2.57%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 10.0: 32.63%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.0 : 16.34%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 : 37.48%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 : 2.26%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 : 8.49%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 : 0.23%
(Source: NetMarketShare. Note that this is global so skewed a bit by all the pirated copies of Windows XP in China, etc)
IE is a bit of a mess browser-wise because we've nearly always had a ton of users not on the latest version. The reason? IE doesn't automatically update to a later version. Every other browser on Windows and Linux does. The only other exception is Safari on Mac OS X, which has specific versions artificially pegged to the OS like IE is with Windows. That's why we have 38% of IE users on an outdated browser like IE8 and 8.5% on IE6. Like IE8, IE9 is lacking in many important areas that users of Firefox, Google Chrome, etc don't need to worry about. IE9 lacks several CSS3 tags that have been supported for a while by Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. IE9 lacks columns support, animation support, transform, and transition support. IE10 and IE11 properly support it.
In short, Google can keep making Google Apps better by dropping support for dead browsers like IE9. I mean dead as in they're not being developed further. They're stuck with broken or non-existent CSS3 support. And, as pointed out by others, the type of organization that's going to try out Google Apps as a MS Office replacement, isn't the type of organization that's going to be stuck on IE8/9.
I think that's missing the point. If a "Microsoft-based company" is mandating IE9 and disallowing browser installs, they're not the sort of shop likely to be trying new office suite software (!) any time soon. Conservative markets are conservative, in general you simply can't market replacement products to them directly.
The only people switching older systems to Docs are the people willing to try new stuff, more or less by definition. A Chrome or Firefox install for these folks isn't nearly as invasive as junking Word and Excel is.
I don't think you're actually correct anymore. There's a huge push going on in enterprise right now to get everyone upgraded from WinXP to at least (and typically) Win7, and many companies are including an upgrade to IE10 or IE11 in part of the desktop image. Generally speaking, unless there are specific reasons for requiring an older version of the browser, they're going with the newest available and allowing it to auto-update.
You should feel good knowing that the predominant reason why this sea change has occurred is because of developers and the pace of the modern web: devs are refusing to target old versions of browsers, especially IE, anymore. In edge cases where a specific browser+version is required, that's pushed to the affected user(s) as a one-off.
My team, anecdotally, don't even test against IE for internal-only apps anymore. We make sure things work with FF & Chrome current and current-1 and that's it. For external facing apps we cross-test against IE current and current-1, too, but that's the minority of our work.
Regardless, what a piece if shit! Just fired it up to check the version (it's version 9, apparently no Windows Update update) and it's so goddamn slow!
I'm now on 100mbps fiber, Firefox and Chrome are pretty much instant, IE takes 10 seconds to open the MSN page, and another 20 to perform a search from the address bar in Bing and open the first result (a Microsoft.com page!). Unbelievable.
Even if the default is to automatically update starting at IE 11 it's irrelevant given that IE 11 is the newest version. Although it is a welcome change going forward.
Are those updates frequent and steady feature updates, a la Chrome, or merely security and bug fix updates? The former would be a big change from previous IE. The latter would mean Google's statement is still basically accurate, and is what most Windows systems have been doing for years with Windows update.
I wonder if Google will ever end up in legal trouble for such a policy. While I don't support the notion that any company or person should have to support any version of OS or browser, knowing the massive effect that Google has on the web market and the fact that they have their own browser, if there is any attempt to specifically lock out older competing browsers, the FTC or EU might have questions about that. If you're pushing to be number one in a massive market, you have to play by different rules (as Microsoft found out in the 90's).
Google hasn't been playing nice with Microsoft for a while (see how many Google apps are in the Windows Phone store, the issue where they locked out IE Mobile from viewing Google Maps, or how they treat Windows Phone trying to interface with YouTube). In a way it's nice to see Microsoft reaping what they've sown so long ago, but in another way it's incredibly frustrating from an end user perspective to be someone who likes Microsoft software (such as Windows Phone) and also enjoy using Google services like Maps and Youtube.
Google should be careful with how much they're pushing against Microsoft, especially with Microsoft's new market position versus Google. Microsoft is hardly the monopoly anymore.
Google doesn't have monopoly power in the office or e-mail hosting markets, so nothing they do with their apps product can be an abuse of monopoly power. You don't have to play by different rules until you have that power, not while you're aspiring to it. They're not pushing #1 in the browser market either for that matter. Chrome is running on around 1 in 3 devices, and has been losing share to Internet Explorer the past few months.
Google is doing the world a big favor with this, forcing people to upgrade to new browsers and defragmenting the web as a whole... not to mention making life a hell of alot easier for all us web developers. Microsoft can just make their browser autoupdate like everyone else is doing.
IE is 58% of the global desktop market, so monopoly rules would not apply.
Google similarly locks out old versions of Chrome and Firefox as well due to not supporting modern CSS3/HTML5/JS standards.
Remember, Google isn't locking IE out at all. Both IE10 and IE11 will continue to be supported. Google's stated policy is to support the current and prior major release of all supported browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari). Microsoft itself has a similar policy of only supporting the relatively modern versions in their online Office suite. They don't support IE8 but do support IE9. That means Windows XP users can't use IE to access Microsoft's online office suite.
> I wonder if Google will ever end up in legal trouble for such a policy.
Why would they? On what basis? Also, even Microsoft doesn't want anyone to support old versions of IE. Microsoft wants to sell Windows licenses, remember?
This market if office software, and web enabled applications. Microsoft most certainly are the closest to a monopoly in office software, how many companies buy Word simply to open files sent to them?
The problem with IE9 was released two years ago, it's last update was more than a year ago and I don't think it will get any more updates that are not security updates (I don't have time to look now but the updates it got were probably just security updates).
And that would very quickly end up with the question of whether all this isn't greatly Microsoft's doing by dropping IE support for older versions of Windows.
This really doesn't make sense apart from for the sake of pushing Chrome, which is using the same bait and switch tactics that Microsoft used in the late 90's and early 00's. Don't be evil eh?
If you look at the FULL chart they reference[1], there are considerably more IE8 users than any Apple device for example and there are more IE8 and IE9 users combined than IE10.
IE8 users are likely on Windows XP as that's the last supported browser version on that. Bye bye XP users unless you install Chrome.
IE9 users are likely on Windows Vista as that's the last supported browser version on that. Bye bye Vista users unless you install Chrome.
This appears to be Google just being a dick, seeing an opportunity and forcing Chrome on people.
To be honest, and I really hate saying this, Microsoft are the only damn company left that has a reasonable support lifecycle these days. Literally everyone else makes a whooshing sound.
> 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
This policy seems kind of broken since browser versioning went crazy. There is no longer any particular link between a "major" version of a browser and the actual technical changes under the hood that came with it. Chrome has a new "major" version what, monthly? FireFox nearly the same? MS sat on IE6 for 5 years and then iterated nearly a major version every year since, but now seems to be correlating them to new (major or minor) versions of Windows. Tying a support policy to something that is so different between browsers, and mostly a marketing device, seems pretty weird to me.
Google's not abandoning these people. Microsoft abandoned them long ago. When I hear from QA that something isn't working on IE8, it ruins my entire day. Even IE10 is dreadful to work with. Good riddance!
I love this. Very reasonable position. The last 2 versions is very reasonable in my opinion. This is common on the mobile app side, developers only supporting the last couple of major OS versions.
And because this is Google they have the weight to make Microsoft think hard about their policies of abandoning their own customers.
It's really not reasonable at all for large non tech-driven businesses... If I were running one of those, this kind of behavior would be a strong anxiety driver for me, which would make me stick with Microsoft and their extremely lax upgrade pushes + strong backward compatibility track record. The reason is that businesses rarely have time to drop everything and upgrade something core, and it's not likely to improve their business in any meaningful way. To them, Google is just being a nuisance with this.
"Android has a much bigger fragmentation problem than Internet Explorer. Supporting only the latest 2 Android releases (4.3 and 4.4) would mean targeting less than 3% of the Android devices."
There are reasons for MS not auto updating IE and leaving update settings to system admins. SAP in my company works only for IE9. One cannot simply drop whatever it is and start working on bug fixes for IE10/11, Firefox and Chrome, irrespective of whose fault it is. Google is being Google in this matter.
I wonder if Google are shooting themselves in the foot a little bit here. The corporate world doesnt move that fast, many companies still use IE7 for instance.
If corporate users cant use gmail etc its going to force them to things like hotmail which im sure will work fine in any version of IE7+
Because HP never upgraded my graphics card drivers on my laptop, I cannot upgrade past IE9 on my Windows 7 machine. (For whatever reason IE10 takes a dependency upon some point release of DirectX that requires driver revisions).
Get Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Maxthon, or any number of modern, standards compliant browsers, and use that. Windows != IE, you can use one without the other. And it's not that they are doing it just because. IE9 is missing a ton of needed HTML5 features which can make Google Docs better. Would you like IE9 support or better docs app. Because that's the choice.
IE10 functions even when the fallback video driver is being used, which certainly doesn't provide hardware acceleration. Are you really sure DirectX or the graphics driver is the cause of not being able to install IE10?
Also, DirectX isn't a separately updatable component, at least in recent versions of Windows. It gets updated as part of regular Windows updates and service packs. (Some software still uses the DirectX redistributable as part of its installer, but in recent versions of Windows, this only installs an optional part of the DirectX 9 interface library.)
Outdated graphics drivers can't provide features introduced with a newer DirectX version, but they shouldn't prevent you from installing IE10.
Reading the chain of issues on your machine, are you sure there's nothing else wrong with your machine? I have had very good experiences with Firefox running for days without issue. I don't have hundreds of tabs like some people, so that might be the reason there.
So why don't you get the drivers directly from AMD, Intel or NVIDIA, as appropriate? Don't rely on computer manufacturers to supply up to date drivers.
As someone who has psychological scars from having to create and maintain IE6 compatible webapps I can't help but have absolutely no sympathy for the web experience of any IE user.
Google could very well go "We don't support IE. If it happens to render or work at all on your browser, count yourself lucky." and I wouldn't care a damn.
Even though Chrome automatically updates on people's personal computers, bureaucracies like my university still use a version that is more than a year old (could be over 2 yrs). I hope Google finds a way to force such luddite organisations to update regularly.
[+] [-] DigitalSea|12 years ago|reply
Websockets, HTML5 File API, FileReader API, XMLHttpRequest 2, Web Workers, IndexedDB, requestAnimationFrame, JS Typed Arrays, PageVisibility and a whole list of other awesome things that IE10+ supports. I'm drooling thinking of all of these new API's I soon will be able to use in my web applications without needing shims.
[+] [-] huxley|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CmonDev|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidjgraph|12 years ago|reply
First point is wrong, from IE 11 the default is automatic updates.
The second point is an unusual way to phrase it...
On the overall topic, I find this strange. Google Docs seems to make efforts to target Microsoft Office users by writing importers for what are very complex formats. It then pretty much cuts itself off from most medium and larger Microsoft based companies, very few of which, in my experience, are up to IE 10.
I wonder if this says something about them really targeting the small, but fastest growing companies and anything really big is nice, but not the priority.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|12 years ago|reply
Microsoft Internet Explorer 11.0: 2.57%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 10.0: 32.63%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.0 : 16.34%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 : 37.48%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 : 2.26%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 : 8.49%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 : 0.23%
(Source: NetMarketShare. Note that this is global so skewed a bit by all the pirated copies of Windows XP in China, etc)
IE is a bit of a mess browser-wise because we've nearly always had a ton of users not on the latest version. The reason? IE doesn't automatically update to a later version. Every other browser on Windows and Linux does. The only other exception is Safari on Mac OS X, which has specific versions artificially pegged to the OS like IE is with Windows. That's why we have 38% of IE users on an outdated browser like IE8 and 8.5% on IE6. Like IE8, IE9 is lacking in many important areas that users of Firefox, Google Chrome, etc don't need to worry about. IE9 lacks several CSS3 tags that have been supported for a while by Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. IE9 lacks columns support, animation support, transform, and transition support. IE10 and IE11 properly support it.
In short, Google can keep making Google Apps better by dropping support for dead browsers like IE9. I mean dead as in they're not being developed further. They're stuck with broken or non-existent CSS3 support. And, as pointed out by others, the type of organization that's going to try out Google Apps as a MS Office replacement, isn't the type of organization that's going to be stuck on IE8/9.
[+] [-] ajross|12 years ago|reply
The only people switching older systems to Docs are the people willing to try new stuff, more or less by definition. A Chrome or Firefox install for these folks isn't nearly as invasive as junking Word and Excel is.
[+] [-] eitally|12 years ago|reply
You should feel good knowing that the predominant reason why this sea change has occurred is because of developers and the pace of the modern web: devs are refusing to target old versions of browsers, especially IE, anymore. In edge cases where a specific browser+version is required, that's pushed to the affected user(s) as a one-off.
My team, anecdotally, don't even test against IE for internal-only apps anymore. We make sure things work with FF & Chrome current and current-1 and that's it. For external facing apps we cross-test against IE current and current-1, too, but that's the minority of our work.
[+] [-] jotm|12 years ago|reply
Regardless, what a piece if shit! Just fired it up to check the version (it's version 9, apparently no Windows Update update) and it's so goddamn slow!
I'm now on 100mbps fiber, Firefox and Chrome are pretty much instant, IE takes 10 seconds to open the MSN page, and another 20 to perform a search from the address bar in Bing and open the first result (a Microsoft.com page!). Unbelievable.
[+] [-] josteink|12 years ago|reply
Actually, I think that is from IE 10, or at least so it is on my machine.
[+] [-] michaelmior|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emn13|12 years ago|reply
Yep, I'm betting on unintended consequence rather than deep plan here.
It would certainly be pretty unwise to exclude the best-paying customers intentionally.
[+] [-] Yaggo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|12 years ago|reply
Google hasn't been playing nice with Microsoft for a while (see how many Google apps are in the Windows Phone store, the issue where they locked out IE Mobile from viewing Google Maps, or how they treat Windows Phone trying to interface with YouTube). In a way it's nice to see Microsoft reaping what they've sown so long ago, but in another way it's incredibly frustrating from an end user perspective to be someone who likes Microsoft software (such as Windows Phone) and also enjoy using Google services like Maps and Youtube.
Google should be careful with how much they're pushing against Microsoft, especially with Microsoft's new market position versus Google. Microsoft is hardly the monopoly anymore.
[+] [-] dangrossman|12 years ago|reply
http://www.w3counter.com/trends
http://gs.statcounter.com/
[+] [-] angularly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|12 years ago|reply
Google similarly locks out old versions of Chrome and Firefox as well due to not supporting modern CSS3/HTML5/JS standards.
Remember, Google isn't locking IE out at all. Both IE10 and IE11 will continue to be supported. Google's stated policy is to support the current and prior major release of all supported browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari). Microsoft itself has a similar policy of only supporting the relatively modern versions in their online Office suite. They don't support IE8 but do support IE9. That means Windows XP users can't use IE to access Microsoft's online office suite.
[+] [-] ahoge|12 years ago|reply
Why would they? On what basis? Also, even Microsoft doesn't want anyone to support old versions of IE. Microsoft wants to sell Windows licenses, remember?
[+] [-] davidjgraph|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Adirael|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taoufix|12 years ago|reply
I don't think so. It's not like they're banning IE9- users from accessing their services. It's just that the content will probably look weird to them.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|12 years ago|reply
If its not current, I'm not sure that it is "competing" in the sense that would normally be relevant in antitrust/competition law.
[+] [-] quink|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csmuk|12 years ago|reply
If you look at the FULL chart they reference[1], there are considerably more IE8 users than any Apple device for example and there are more IE8 and IE9 users combined than IE10.
IE8 users are likely on Windows XP as that's the last supported browser version on that. Bye bye XP users unless you install Chrome.
IE9 users are likely on Windows Vista as that's the last supported browser version on that. Bye bye Vista users unless you install Chrome.
This appears to be Google just being a dick, seeing an opportunity and forcing Chrome on people.
To be honest, and I really hate saying this, Microsoft are the only damn company left that has a reasonable support lifecycle these days. Literally everyone else makes a whooshing sound.
[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201310... (stats are all bullshit on this anyway TBH).
Footnote: I'm posting this from Firefox on OpenBSD before I get accused of being a shill...
[+] [-] zmmmmm|12 years ago|reply
This policy seems kind of broken since browser versioning went crazy. There is no longer any particular link between a "major" version of a browser and the actual technical changes under the hood that came with it. Chrome has a new "major" version what, monthly? FireFox nearly the same? MS sat on IE6 for 5 years and then iterated nearly a major version every year since, but now seems to be correlating them to new (major or minor) versions of Windows. Tying a support policy to something that is so different between browsers, and mostly a marketing device, seems pretty weird to me.
[+] [-] l0c0b0x|12 years ago|reply
Sweet move Google/Chrome.
[+] [-] mratzloff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acjohnson55|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Touche|12 years ago|reply
And because this is Google they have the weight to make Microsoft think hard about their policies of abandoning their own customers.
[+] [-] ericd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dshep|12 years ago|reply
"Android has a much bigger fragmentation problem than Internet Explorer. Supporting only the latest 2 Android releases (4.3 and 4.4) would mean targeting less than 3% of the Android devices."
Must be accurate coming from Google.
[+] [-] hbharadwaj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filipedeschamps|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c23gooey|12 years ago|reply
If corporate users cant use gmail etc its going to force them to things like hotmail which im sure will work fine in any version of IE7+
[+] [-] com2kid|12 years ago|reply
So, umm, gee thanks Google? Ugh.
[+] [-] x0054|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zr40|12 years ago|reply
Also, DirectX isn't a separately updatable component, at least in recent versions of Windows. It gets updated as part of regular Windows updates and service packs. (Some software still uses the DirectX redistributable as part of its installer, but in recent versions of Windows, this only installs an optional part of the DirectX 9 interface library.)
Outdated graphics drivers can't provide features introduced with a newer DirectX version, but they shouldn't prevent you from installing IE10.
[+] [-] msvan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sukuriant|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monitron|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelGG|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmircea|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laichzeit0|12 years ago|reply
Google could very well go "We don't support IE. If it happens to render or work at all on your browser, count yourself lucky." and I wouldn't care a damn.
[+] [-] outside1234|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aldo_MX|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JEVLON|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beauzero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quaffapint|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mukundmr|12 years ago|reply