Google said it is phasing out support for Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3 and their predecessors in Google Apps in favor of Chrome and other browsers that handle HTML5.
Google
(NASDAQ: GOOG) said it will on Aug. 1 phase out support for older versions of
Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari in its Google
Apps collaboration software.
The search-engine
giant has been putting most of its wood behind HTML5, upgrading its own
applications to support the fresher Web markup language. Google's own Chrome
Web browser and Chrome Operating System were built from the beginning to handle
HTML5.
Google is
banking on Chrome and HTML5 to make Web applications the rule rather than the
exception to legacy on-premise software created by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and
others. Chrome OS notebooks from Samsung and Acer are
launching in two weeks to introduce the
commercial consumer market to Google's cloud-computing experience, which hinges
on Web applications.
"For Web
applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams
need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers," Venkat
Panchapakesan, Google's vice president of engineering,
said June 2.
Examples of
features that require browsers that support HTML5 include Google's desktop
notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs,
Panchapakesan said. This naturally includes Chrome, as well as fresher Firefox,
IE and Safari versions.
Older Web browsers,
he explained, lack "the chops" to provide today's Web application
users with a quality experience.
To that end,
Google Aug. 1 will
shed support for Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer
7, Safari 3 and their preceding versions.
What this
means is that users of these older browsers may have trouble using certain
features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites.
Eventually, Google said these applications might stop working at all.
Google will
support only the current and prior major releases of Chrome, Firefox, IE and
Safari on a "rolling basis." This means each time a new version is
released, Google will begin supporting the update and stop supporting the
third-oldest version.
There is
precedent for this at Google, which last year
shed support for the much-maligned but ubiquitous
IE6 in Google Docs and Google Sites.
"Many
other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Microsoft
Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own
manufacturers," Google Apps Senior Product Manager Rajen Sheth said at the
time.
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