Dear Google Apps admin,

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.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

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Google Inc.
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Looks like the Browser war is never gonna stop…

The Pencil Project runs as a standalone application or as a Firefox add-on. You can download it at the main site or directly from the evoluspencil code repository where you can also find more stencils packages.

Go get it now!

As a browser, Lunascape probably has the most to offer to web developers, who can use a single application to check how their work looks in three different rendering engines, namely Trident, Gecko, and WebKit. It also comes with features like script and Java blocking, and when using the Trident engine, you can block ActiveX too.

This new version adds a number of very welcome features, the most important would be that it is compatible with Firefox add-ons. You can now utilize the vast array of add-ons for Firefox in addition to IE add-ons and Lunascape plug-ins, in a single platform.

Other new features include:

• New interface design (Orion) – sleek, simple, and easy to use
• Split tab display – you can view a website in 3 engines side-by-side (hooray for web designers and developers!)
• Sidebar 2.0 – The floating sidebar can handle multiple sidebar add-ons (e.g. minimap) at a time (only from beta) and can be separately displayed anywhere including another monitor.

The interface has also been given an update, but in my short period of using it, I found this by far the weakest aspect of Lunascape. It uses Qt4, but redraw performance (for instance, when resizing) is absolutely terrible, there are visual artefacts all over the place, and it doesn’t follow any of the Windows Aero UI conventions – it’s all custom.

However, the main attraction is it’s triple rendering engine, which could make the browser an invaluable tool for web developers. It’s still in beta, so things could still improve, too.

Lunascape is a Windows browser, and you can download the new beta from their website.

In just five years, Firefox has taken 24 percent of the browser market share, according to Net Applications. it still sits in second place behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which controls about 65 percent of the market. But Firefox is far ahead of third-place Apple Safari.

Close

Mozilla’s Melissa Shapiro wrote in a blog post.

Five years ago today, Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0 with belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all. Within the first four days of launch, more than 1 million people had downloaded a brand new browsing experience.

The thing i like about Mozilla’s Web browser is the option of Add-Ons : unlike Internet Explorer, whose system for adding ‘Accelerators’ feels a bit clunky, and Chrome, which doesn’t have add-ons at all, Firefox’s Add-On system feels like it’s a natural fit for the browser. Also unlike other browsers Firefox still keeps the menu bar i.e. “File,” “Edit,” “View,” and “Tools”. When you need to manage your browser, it’s nice to have those options up front.