> "As a note, we’ll of course continue to measure traffic from IE8 browsers to your website."
I've worked for quite a few enterprise clients, and many of them are in offices working on old hardware and old software. The lucky ones get Windows 7, but I know plenty of people that are stuck on XP and IE8 (if they are lucky). Many of these users would love to use this Chrome or Firefox browser that every external company suggests, but their IT department won't let them install anything.
Now, if they can't view their Analytics reports without a modern browser, we'll start to see some changes.
It's a huge move, and should go a long way to getting these pesky users away from their legacy browsers and OS.
"As a note, we’ll of course continue to measure traffic from IE8 browsers to your website."
That's all I need google. Thanks.
Anyway, this is why IE8 in particular is a cutoff for compatibility. A lot of startups are not building their sites to be compatible with IE8.
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33864
It's probably just a matter of cost to support that much legacy.
As far as legacy Android, 2.3 usage will probably drop like a rock over the next two years. A 3-4 year old cell phone is going to be really out of date.
IE9+ has some sort of support for SVG while IE7 and IE8 implement VML. :-/
Note that this is really not true. If you look at various[1] global browsers stats pages, you'll notice that NetApplications (where the author is getting his's numbers from) is the only one that puts IE at the top. If you look at the other, and based on my own stats, this just isnn't the case, and IE8 is not the most popular browser in the world, not by far.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...
Abandoning IE8 for various services will slowly start to hurt Microsoft as it forces people into using (probably) Chrome, or if not, FireFox. Especially once you are using Chrome, the lure of Google's ecosystem starts to become irresistable, and as Chrome use itself grows, Chrome as a platform becomes more and more attractive.
Of course this move in itself is irrelevant to that because it only affects such a tiny percentage of people. But as you add up a lot of niche services it will start to have a significant impact, I think.
I hope those organizations you cite have a plan for April. If they run XP, they must update. If they run Vista+, they can switch to a newer IE and use GPO to force IE8-mode for the intranet (if they wish so).
Now, if this were Gmail, this would be news
