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Google Drops Support For Old Browsers

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 08:02:45 +0000

Web companies like Google, WordPress or Facebook are suddenly realizing that old web browsers may have a serious impact on the support they offer. While everyone applauds the companies for dropping support for Internet Explorer 6, the feelings may be mixed when it comes to Google’s announcement to discontinue support for additional browsers.

According to the official Gmail Blog, Google will drop support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari 3. Dropping support does not mean that users will be blocked from using Google services, but it does mean that Google may develop and implement features that no longer work in those browsers.

To put it in plain words: When Google develops new features and services, the company will not test them using the browsers they dropped support for.

Support will be dropped on August 1, and Google notes that “may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites” from that day on, and that users may notice eventually that “these apps may stop working entirely”.

From August 1 on, Google will only support modern browsers. For them, that is Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, and only the two newest versions of each browser will be supported. When Firefox 5 comes out, support will be dropped for Firefox 3.6, with Firefox 6 support for Firefox 4 will be dropped and so on.

Most features will continue to work in dropped browser versions for a long time to come. Chance is, users will be able to use those browsers indefinitely. Only features that require new technologies like HTML5 may not work in those browsers, drag and drop file uploading or desktop notifications come to mind.

No mentioning of Opera anywhere in the announcement, it is as usual ignored by Google.

What’s your take on this? Is this the right step to force users to update their browsers more frequently?

Alternative Linux web browsers

Jack Wallen — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:57:17 +0000

You know Firefox like the back of your hand. You’ve heard tale of Chrome and you know KDE has tried to pawn Konqueror off as their default browser. In the distance you hear Opera calling your name and IE4Lin tries to woo you to the dark side. Browsers, the lot of them. You can’t go about your daily digital life without one, and sometimes it’s just hard to tell which is the best for the job. But did you know there were even more alternatives to choose from? Many of them are one-trick ponies and some of them will never see the light of day on the average (or even somewhat above-average users’ desktop). But that doesn’t mean that these alternatives shouldn’t get a brief spot in the limelight.

In this article I am going to introduce you to some of those alternative web browsers and show you what they have to offer. I will skip over the installation of these browsers as you will most likely find them in your distributions’ repositories. These browsers will be in no certain order.

Arora

Arora

Arora is a light-weight, cross-platform web browser (so long as the platform will run Qt) that offers many of the features you have come to love on your browser (and then some). Arora uses the QTWebKit port of the WebKit layout engin. The feature list looks like:

Fast startup
Desktop integration
Smart location bar
Session management
Privacy
Search engine management
Flash plugin support
Download manager
Tools for web developers
Translations for thirty languages.

Elinks

Elinks

I can’t help but add a text-based web browser to this list. Elinks hearkens back to my old Lynx days where browsing the web was not interrupted by images, ads, and flash. Why would you want to use such a browser? Simple: Elinks is fast. Not Chrome fast…even faster. Elinks is so fast you will miss your pages load if you blink – that kind of fast. But remember, you only get text here. You use Elinks from within a terminal window. Open one up and enter the command elinks. Hit the key and then enter a url. Simple. Fast. What more do you want from the web? ;-)

Epiphany

Epiphany

Epiphany is supposed to be the web browser for the GNOME desktop. It isn’t really, but it does try. Epiphany lives somewhere between Elinks and Arora. It’s not text-only, but it will handle your fancy-shmancy plugins. Epiphany lets you concentrate on the content, not the application displaying the content.

Epiphany does offer a few nice features:

Security
Customizable interface
Smart bookmarks
Extensions and plugins

I was pleasantly surprised that Epiphany handled, out of the box, Flash plugins (and handled them well.)

Final thoughts

There you go: Three browsers you most likely have never heard of nor ever tried. I have run the gamut of browsers and I can say that each of the above browsers certainly has their place in the landscape of the internet. Will any of them threaten the monsters of the ball? Absolutely not. Does that mean you shouldn’t give them a try? No, you definitely should…especially if you’ve never experienced the web in its purest, text-only form.

I would highly recommend you give one of these browsers a go. You might find your new favorite app!

Internet Privacy: Start Panic Tells You Where You Have Been

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:33:14 +0000

Internet privacy (also know as online privacy or web privacy) has become a hot topic in the last years as companies, organizations and people with malicious intent try to gather as many data as possible about Internet users. Many users install security software on their computer system and as add-ons in their web browsers directly to protect their systems against various attacks including those privacy breaches.

Start Panic tries to raise public awareness for Internet privacy issues on their website. They have implemented a script that will gather information about previously used websites from the user’s web browser. Two aspects make this interesting. The first is that it is a cross-browser solution. It works in all major web browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari. The second aspect is that it will display results even if the user clears his web browser’s history, cookies and cache regularly. The current browsing session is recorded normally in all web browsers which usually have options to automatically clear these traces on exit only.

The process is started by the user who has to press the Let’s Start button. It can take a minute or two before the results are displayed. The list should contain the list of websites that have been visited in this browsing session. It might contain more websites if the user is not deleting the history regularly.

Little is revealed about how the script does its magic but it seems to rely on JavaScript. Anyone with JavaScript disabled in the web browser does not have to fear this privacy issue.