Google today publicized it has withdrawn support for Microsoft IE 9 in Google Apps, comprising its Government Business and Education editions. Google says it has stopped all engineering and testing work associated to IE9, specified that IE11 was launched on October 17 along with Windows 8.1.
This means that Internet Explorer 9 customers who make use of Gmail and other Google Apps services will be informed “inside the next few weeks” that they must upgrade to a more up-to-date web browser. Google says this will either take place via an in-product notification memo or an interstitial page.
As far as Google is apprehensive, this is business as typical:
We would like to remind you of the Google Apps browser support policy, the set of guidelines for Google Apps services interoperability support. We support the latest version of Google Chrome (which automatically updates whenever it detects that a new version of the browser is available) as well as the current and prior major release of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version of one of these browsers is released, we begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.
Internet Explorer 9 was introduced on March 14, 2011. Though it was not knotted to a particular Windows release (as most IE versions are), Microsoft only made it accessible for Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
In September 2012, Google exterminated off Internet Explorer 8 support in Google Apps. It looks like at this frequency, if Microsoft launches a new web browser version each year, majority of the IE users will have to upgrade frequently if they wish to keep making use of Google Apps regularly..
The worthy news here is that IE9′s market share has been dropping progressively ever since IE10′s introduction in the market, a trend that is anticipated to quicken with the launch of Internet Explorer 11. However, it still had more than 9 percent market share last month, so Google is creating yet one more hypothetically big cut.
