So…apparently Google is phasing out support for Internet Explorer 7.
I know this not because of any blog I follow (which probably says more about me than it does about the blogs) but instead because a friend of mine and I use Google Docs to do collaborative writing, and she occasionally checks into it from work, where she is unfortunately shackled to IE7 because of her IT department. The way that we learned of this “phase out” of support was that basically everything suddenly stopped working for her about three days ago after she innocently decided to check out the “new look” which Google was touting for her approval. As soon as she switched it on (even though she tried to switch it off again after) the damage was done, and everything from editing ability to chat functionality has since crashed for her.
As the few people who have followed my sporadic blogging know, I take a certain amount of interest in Google’s business/design practices because I find their ability to absorb user bases like a sponge frankly astounding. As a general rule I tend to admire the company’s approach even while being somewhat disconcerted by the role they’re starting to take in…well..everything, because I truly feel that they’re getting that way primarily by being extremely shrewd and extremely good at what they do.
This is the first time I’ve been truly irritated with them.
Now, understand, I’m not berating the idea of providing a less rich experience to someone using an older browser. Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser? Of course not. And there’s no point in restraining yourself to the limited featureset of IE7 when you can do shiny things for your Chrome and Firefox users. But the fact of the matter is — if a browser holds (according to at least one report) a roughly 7.5% usage share and only 0.25% less than Firefox 6, you should be making sure those people can use your site. They don’t have to be given a lot of pretty extraneous stuff and it doesn’t even have to look the same but it has to be usable.
This is the whole idea behind progressive enhancement, which I’ve written about before. I have to say, I don’t understand the approach that Google is taking at all. I find it hard to believe that, with the huge team they have available, they can’t find a way to make their apps degrade gracefully, and given that the IE7 and Firefox stats aren’t *that* dissimilar, it smacks of being a little arrogant not to offer some solution for those users.
There is, I acknowledge, some irony in this, since I was one of the people yipping with delight when I saw that Google was giving up support of IE6. So perhaps it can be said that I’m being hypocritical by jumping on them for this decision. However, there’s three major differences, as I see it, between the two situations:
- I’m on the receiving end of this one. A bit petty, but there you have it. I’ve never used IE6 regularly for anything in my life, that I recall (we were a Netscape household when I was a wee lass before we switched to Firefox), and so the rejection of IE6 meant little or nothing to me except that it was a valid reason to avoid worrying about a certain aspect of my work. However, now I’m (indirectly) affected by the choice not to gracefully degrade, and I’m annoyed.
- There are major differences between IE6 and IE7. Both browsers are irritating and require workarounds occasionally to make most things workable. But IE6 was and is *proverbially* bad — a mischievous, evil thing whose box model works in mysterious ways. IE7 by comparison is far more predictable and malleable, and seems (in my admittedly limited experience) like it would be much easier to gracefully degrade down to.
- Not building for a browser and encouraging upgrades is way different from shutting off the user base entirely. I actually would have applied this one to the IE6 drop as well, if I’d thought about it at the time. If Google wants to encourage its users to upgrade away from IE7, more power to them and in fact most of us in the industry will thank them. But it’s unfair to assume that everyone has this option and not to leave them some kind of usable, if not particularly shiny, second path which they can follow in the meantime.
All in all, I’m surprised at the approach that seems to be being taken here. I doubt it will hurt Google very much in the long run, of course, but still…I find it perplexing and will be interested to see if it elicits any general backlash.