Browsers Currently Supported By Google

Google Apps, such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs etc lean heavily on Javascript to create fluid web applications. Naturally this requires up to date browsers to take advantage of functionality and technologies.

Google’s policy on browser support is quite strict, especially where Internet Explorer is concerned. For Chrome only the latest version is supported because of its auto-update policy. Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari are supported in the most recent, and previous version. The third most recent browser is no longer supported as soon as a new one is released. No official support is offered for Opera.

This is particularly strict for Internet Explorer, since its versioning is vastly different from that of Chrome and Firefox, with the latter incrementing the version for much smaller changes, and being more frequent. Another effect is that ruling out what is currently IE9 rules out both Windows XP and Windows Vista - both OSs currently supported by Microsoft.

Naturally this doesn’t mean that the products won’t work, anjd in many cases they were developed before support was dropped for specific versions. In some cases however it does enforce a more simplistic UI, such as redirecting very old browsers to a Basic HTML view for Gmail