Yes, dropping support for IE 7 is fine. But the recently weird-ified FF release schedule is going to make this new Google Apps policy have strange results.
FF 4 was released 3 months ago. It's just now looking confidence-inspiring enough that I'm considering upgrading to it on my Mac this week. But now Google is going to drop support for it when FF 6 is released in a couple of months???
Another issue: if I'm not mistaken, the fact that Ubuntu releases stick with a particular browser version, means that the LTS releases (and 10.04 in particular) will stay with a version of FF long after Google Apps has stopped supporting it.
Both of these strike me as serious problems. Perhaps the Google Apps people have not really thought through the ramifications of this policy?
I think we can be confident that Google will "Do the right thing" - they aren't blindly following a "Drop Support for versionX when versionCurrent = versionX+2"
I'm reasonably certain by that by "Two Major Versions" they are referring to "Versions that alter how the platform interacts with the Web." - So, as long as FF 5 and FF 6 behave reasonably similarly, they'll be treated as the same major version, and Google will support FF4 and FF5/6.
Or, it may be the case, after some review, that FF4/FF5/FF6 will all be treated as the same major version, and official support on August, 2011 will be for FF3.6 and FF4/5/6. Time will tell.
> I think we can be confident that Google will "Do the right thing"'
Well, hopefully. But they've officially announced the dropping of support, so I have to wonder.
> I'm reasonably certain by that by "Two Major Versions" they are referring to "Versions that alter how the platform interacts with the Web."
That might be. But that makes me wonder about FF. Apparently the changes from 3.5 to 3.6 are more significant than those from 4 to 6. What's the deal with that?
I seem to recall reading that Ubuntu changed its browser policy on LTS releases to upgrade to the next stable version of Firefox when Mozilla stops releasing security updates for the version used by the LTS release.
Dropping support ≠ stops working. Dropping support means that if you go to them with a support query their support staff are legitimately allowed to say “use a newer browser”.
FF 4 was released 3 months ago. It's just now looking confidence-inspiring enough that I'm considering upgrading to it on my Mac this week. But now Google is going to drop support for it when FF 6 is released in a couple of months???
Another issue: if I'm not mistaken, the fact that Ubuntu releases stick with a particular browser version, means that the LTS releases (and 10.04 in particular) will stay with a version of FF long after Google Apps has stopped supporting it.
Both of these strike me as serious problems. Perhaps the Google Apps people have not really thought through the ramifications of this policy?