Gmail gives old browsers the heave ho
February 5, 2010 by Valerie HelmbreckPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Information security, Latest News & Views, cybercrime, e-commerce
Google’s announced the end of support for some of the creaky old Web browsers out there. Among them: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE).
It would seem recent hacks that have targeted some of Google’s popular services may be responsible for the decision.
Also on the no-support list: Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0, Apple’s Safari 2.0 and Google’s own Chrome 3.0.
This latest call by Google to “drop IE6″ adds to the chorus of service and site providers imploring users and businesses to get rid of the nearly nine-year-old browser.
But that’s easier said than done. Some legacy systems still rely on the old version of the browser and making the change for these folks could be tremendously complicated.
Even Microsoft itself has been urging users to make the switch.
FinanceTechNews.com delivers the latest Finance news once a week to the inboxes of over 150,000 Finance professionals.
Click here to sign up and start your FREE subscription to FinanceTechNews!
Tags: gmail, Google, Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft
February 15th, 2010 at 11:37 am
Businesses that use legacy apps requiring IE6 need to use Firefox/Chrome/etc. as the default internet browser and keep IE6 only for their in-house use. It amazes me how many corporations are strictly M$ shops, but refuse to update anything because of ‘compatibility issues.’
February 15th, 2010 at 11:56 am
GMail went haywire the day Google deployed a change in mid-January. It will not run in IE 7. In the morning prior to leaving for work, GMail worked fine using IE 7.
I arrived home in the evening, and tried to bring up GMail and the brower went haywire and was stuck in some sort of error loop.
I also use FireFox, which works fine.
February 15th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Topher:
1) Businesses do not want to spend money to upgrade their system. If everything is working, they don’t want to touch it.
2) Businesses have their own custom programs (not strictly M$ shops). Rewriting thousand line of codes guarantee bugs. Downtime = loss money + frustration + pressure on the MS department. Therefore, the ms department does not want to change it either.
3) It’s the people/user. There are so many dumb users (you don’t realize until you are working in the ms department)
March 8th, 2010 at 11:01 am
Is this because Google is switching to HTML5?
What specifically is the upgrade Google is adopting that is causing problems with the older systems?
March 8th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
I still do not understand why gmail will not work with IE 7?