Browser currency
Wednesday, 8 June, 2011 — web-development google
On August 1, 2011, Google is dropping support for IE 7 and several other browsers:
[S]oon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.
Separately, Jason Rudolph of Relevance says of this:
Google finds it economically infeasible to support IE 6 & 7. You have less money than Google. Apply transitive law here.
What makes me happy about this is Google is giving web developers cover to drop older browsers. Imagine Google is the dollar. Web developers can in essence peg their currency to the dollar and move in lockstep with browser support. There is absolutely the possibility of getting a suboptimal result, but the upside looks really good. First, it gives predictability to your user base. Second, that user base is already likely to be motivated to stay on the bright side of Google’s support. Third, it’s a signal to management that the product has to keep moving forward to meet user expectations.
This absolutely doesn’t mean there won’t be hard work in keeping up with multiple browser versions, but it limits the pain by not having to support three rendering engines and three JavaScript interpreters for each browser a site supports.