Google dropping support for Internet Explorer 7

Yesterday, Google announced their plans to stop supporting older browsers. From 1 August 2011, only the current and previous versions of the main browsers will be guaranteed to work with Google's suite of web applications (which for a lot of people primarily means Google Mail).

For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

With Internet Explorer now up to version 9, this means that they will no longer support version 7 (not too surprising, given that it's nearly 5 years old).

Looking at our own stats for the University of York website, last month we saw IE7 account for 5.7% of our traffic, with ten-year-old IE6 still hanging on in there with 2.7% of our visits.

With Microsoft also behind a campaign to move the world off Internet Explorer 6, things are looking promising for getting people to move over to much more modern browsers.