Google Apps to Stop Supporting Old Browsers in August

Google, the internet search giant, has decided to stop supporting its online apps in older browsers starting on August 1, 2011.

Browsers that will be dropped will include internet explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 3.5 and Safari 3.

This is due to Google's plans to renovate its online apps service that will rely strongly on the new HTML5 Web standard. Using the old browsers will cause various incompatibilities with Google's services.

In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely, Google wrote on its blog.

This is first time that Google has advised customers and users to upgrade their old browsers to a newer one. In January 2010, Google said it was discarding Google Docs support for IE6, the Microsoft browser that still accounts for 10.4% of all browsers in use.

According to StatCounter, 17 per cent of the users need to upgrade their browsers. Among these users who need to change the browsers, a quarter of them were in China using IE6.

Older browsers just don't have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience, said Google VP of Engineering Venkat Panchapakesan on the Official Google Engineering blog on Thursday.

These new browsers are more than just a modern convenience; they are a necessity for what the future holds, he said.

In mid-May Firefox started a plan to get the 12 million people using version 3.5 of its browser to update. And they said it was a tough challenge to get people to make an update. They even had to use pop-up screens, adverts, re-directs and updates to make people to update their old versions of Firefox.

About 34 percent of Chinese net users are on IE6, as are 22.3 percent of South Koreans and 11.6 percent of Vietnamese people.