Google To Get Unsupportive of Ageing Browsers

If you’re among the ones who’re still stuck on loyally to your ageing browsers, you might have to do so at the cost of losing a handful of services that Google offers. The search giant has announced that those users who’re still using the older, ageing versions of the popular browsers like IE7, Safari 3, Firefox 3.5 will not have access to a couple of Google’s immensely popular features – Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, among others.

Either our way, or the highway!

Browser biggies have been issuing notices for a while asking users to switch over to the latest versions of their respective browsers which they keep rolling out at regular intervals. We recently reported about Mozilla struggling to get 12 million of its users onto the latest versions of Firefox. Apparently, even though, Mozilla managed to post an attractive milestone with over 150 million downloads for its latest version of Firefox (Firefox 4), it was struggling in the truest sense of the term to get a good 12 million users to use its latest builds. Firefox, was quoted as being at the end of its tether with the unending patches that the ageing browsers need. Firefox isn’t alone, other major browsers, too have this problem in common. The older browsers also lack compatibility with HTML 5 making it difficult for its engineers to incorporate any modern day changes, thus making the need to shift over to the newer versions all the more urgent.

The cutting off of services by Google will take effect from August 1, this year; and StatCounter, the web stats provider states that this strong emotion by Google would have the much needed effect on over 17 per cent of the users. Meanwhile, Mozilla’s campaign to initiate the migration from the older versions seems to have worked wonders for the browser. The numbers of users using the older versions now stand at a million.

Source: BBC News