Google adandoning older browsers

[Will]

Google adandoning older browsers, highlight from the BBC News article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13639875):

Those using IE7, Safari 3, Firefox 3.5 and their predecessors to view Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Docs and Sites will then lose some functions.

[David]

Interesting. The policy seems to be that they will support the current version of major browsers and the prior release but not the one before that. So, for example, IE9 and IE8 will be supported but not IE7 and earlier. When IE10 is released, support for IE8 will be dropped. This is a policy I approve of. Maybe now that Google have made this move, web designers will be able to follow.

This is clearly to do with the frustrations that developers are experiencing in trying to add new functionality for "modern" browsers while providing acceptable fall-back for legacy browsers.