Google Drops Support For Older Browsers

Google has been busy lately. Chromebook coming out tomorrow, constant updates on their Chrome browser. Google Wallet (which I’ll talk about tomorrow if you are following!) which lets you pay turn your phone into a credit card. Just non-stop ideas and innovation from that company and this new idea might be the one big step forward and a step back – I’m still on the fence. Google has announced that they will stop support for older browsers starting August 1st. This is a bold move to push the new advances in Web Technology such as HTML 5 and CSS3 but if we look at any browser statistic anywhere you’ll notice that Internet Explorer takes up a good portion of the browser market and by Internet Explorer we mean IE8 or less. Then we look at the statistic of operating systems and we see that Windows XP is still widely used and does not support some of the newer browsers. Most of the companies I know still run Windows XP because of its simplicity and it would also be too expensive or too much of a hassle to upgrade the OS.

Here’s what is going to happen. Google will slowly drop features off of their applications for slower browsers until it stops working altogether. It will only give out support to the latest 3 versions of the top browsers. This means that when Internet Explorer 11 comes out in August or early next year the support for Internet Explorer 8 will be dropped completely. That could be bad for Google. Companies will either be forced to upgrade or find some kind of third party program(s) to work with. Like I stated earlier I am on the fence with this. I do want to see more progression of HTML5 and CSS3 plus the phasing out of older browsers (Mainly IE7…) so we can move onto a faster more progressive web experience. On the other hand I do not want to see these companies struggle with the constant updates and changes. It will really show the strengths of a company’s IT staff that’s for sure. Does your company still run Windows XP? What browser is your company mostly using? What is your opinion on this bold new step by Google?