Google discontinues support for Internet Explorer 6

by Matthew Ogston on February 2, 2010

Google have finally announced that they will be discontinuing support for IE6. Below is the announcement sent to all of their Google Apps customers today:

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.

Although i’m not a big fan of IE6 by any stretch of the imagination, I don’t think that this is a particularly good move for Google. Google are trying to pitch their Apps products to corporate customers – head to head with Microsoft. However, a large number of very big corporations still use IE6 as the browser of choice. And they certainly won’t stop using IE6, just because Google forces them to.

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Amazon S3 for beginners

by Matthew Ogston on January 25, 2010

I thought getting Amazon’s S3 storage service up and running would take ages and be quite a mountain to climb. So i was pleased to find this excellent article on getting your first Amazon S3 ‘bucket’ up and running. You’ll need the FireFox S3 add-on (free download) to complete the instructions. Should take you about 10 minutes to complete the tutorial! Would love to hear how you get on.

Update: If you would like to use your own domain for accessing your files stored on S3 (e.g. cdn.mydomain.com instead of my-assets.s3.amazonaws.com), then you’ll find this article useful: How to Alias a Domain Name or Sub Domain to Amazon S3

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What makes a good landing page ?

January 18, 2010

I’ve just published a new post over on the PageDo Landing Page Optimization Blog discussing the definition of what makes a good landing page. There’s a ton of confusion around what is, and what is not a landing page. So simply put, a landing page is:
A web page that is focussed on achieving a single [...]

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Creating .htaccess domain redirects & page redirects for lazy people

January 12, 2010

One of my weak areas has always been writing domain and page redirects using .htaccess rules. So i was happy to discover this morning (via stevenhargrove.com) a new online tool to help write these tricky, but essential, little files, http://www.htaccesseditor.com.
Developed by Hideyo Ryoken & Masato Mannen, it provides a simple interface for creating the most [...]

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New year, new website, new future, fantastic new projects…

January 4, 2010

I’m currently in the process of upgrading my own website, ogston.com, after nearly 12 months of neglect. Due to other project commitments, I haven’t posted anything here since 2008, so it’s long overdue a makeover. Apologies for some broken links and a rather lazy default layout for the next few weeks until i get things [...]

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Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source

August 23, 2008

Delicious competitor Magnolia has announced that they will be making their platform open source.

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