Google Apps To Abandon (Slightly) Older Browsers

Posted 06/02/2011 at 12:05pm | by Brad Chacos

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Google Apps are awesome. Google Docs is excellent for business and school work, Google Voice lets you check if strangers' refrigerators are running worldwide, and everyone and his one-eyed sister has a Gmail account. As it turns out, Google Apps is so full of unadulterated awesome that a lot of the older Web browsers on the market just can't keep up with all the HTML5 goodness. Rather than bend over backwards to support obsolete software, Google's kicking them to the curb.

"Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience," Venkat Panchapakesan, Google's VP of Engineering said in a blog post on Wednesday. The official deadline is August 1st; on that day, Google Apps is going to shove Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari 3 off the train, leaving the browsers tumbling in the dust as technology speeds by without them. After that, Panchapakesan reports that Google will only support the two most recent versions of the major browsers. When a new version is released, the third-oldest version will be be dropped.

In a nutshell: it's time to upgrade to Firefox 4 if you haven't already, and if you rely on the late-night mathematics of Gmail's beer goggles feature to keep you from drunk-emailing your boss and telling him how much you hate him in the wee hours of the morning, make sure to keep your browser up to date.