blog.no-panic.at

I just received this email from Google and I must say I’m applauding to their decision!

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,
The Google Apps team

In short Google Docs & Google Sites will only support the following browsers from March 1st, 2010 (with Google Mail & Google Calendar following later that year):

• Internet Explorer 7.0 and above
• Firefox 3.0 and above
• Google Chrome 4.0 and above
• Safari 3.0 and above

Let’s hope this move creates enough momentum to get people to stop using those shitty old browsers that always give me hours (or even days) of headache, whenever I have to make sure a site is cross-browser compatible. I might even predict that this dreaded term of “cross browser compatibility” may soon be only a distant memory from the past, as all the latest browsers pretty much agree on how to render HTML and treat the DOM (and therefore JavaScript)

Google not only seems to have permanently activated their SearchWIKI functionality for me, but also something that could prove to be quite useful.

Each result which points to a forum- or comment-kind of conversation, now states the number of replies and the date of the last post in that thread.

(Click on the image to see a larger version.)

Adium participated in this year’s Google Summer of Code and took 6 students for a full time internship. The projects they worked on where quite successful as it sounds.

Of course the thing I’m mostly looking forward to is the Audio/Video integration. It wasn’t completely finished in this SoC but it seems like they now have a pretty solid base to build upon.

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I’m constantly surprised by Google. They keep making their service better and better. Most of it is just stumbled on unintentionally by me.

Today while listening to Diggnation I wondered where the company Dell is located because they where talking about it. So out of pure boredom I typed in “where is dell” into the Google search field in Safari.

To my surprise I received something like an actual answer to my question on top of the usual search results.

I tried a couple more companies and sites, with different success (Google doesn’t know where Disneyland is ). So now I wonder what else can I “ask” Google? Any suggestions?

Aside from all the Mac frenzy over todays Keynote by Steve Jobs there was another interesting announcement: Google Earth for Mac.

I won’t write anything here about all the Apple announcements from Macworld’s opening, because you can read about it all over the place and I would just be duplicating old news

Google Earth runs on Mac OS 10.4 and up and is coming out of beta status as of today. All of you who illegally took a sneak peek at it via the leaked beta should update as well, because there are a few features which weren’t quite ready in the leaked version.

» so go for it

edit: looks like it’s PowerPC only! Not very wise, after the first Intel Macs got announced today