14 DAY TRIAL // WordPress is not the only blogging platform that is dropping support for legacy browsers. Blogger has announced that it's following the company line and will only support the last two versions of a browser, from now on.
The change will be effective starting August 1st at which time, Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3 and Chrome 10 will no longer be supported.
The move mirrors the one made by Google across the company, many of its products are now doing the same.
"Starting next month Blogger.com will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis," Blogger announced.
"Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version," it added.
While the move may seem aggressive there's good reason for it, not only is it good practice, Blogger is introducing a completely revamped dashboard and very modern templates which will require browsers that are 'fluent' in the latest web technologies, HTML5, CSS3 and the likes.
"For web applications like Blogger to continue to evolve at a rapid pace, our engineering team needs to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers," Blogger explained.
"For example, Dynamic Views, which we previewed in March, and Web Fonts both require advanced browsers that support HTML5," it said.
Google is doing the same with Google Apps, which means Gmail, Calendar, Docs and others will only support the last two major versions of a browser. What Google hopes to achieve with this is to force users to start thinking differently and start viewing updates as a necessity.
Obviously, the browser version is not always the user's choice, but this way, system admins will be forced to do more frequent updates as well, something that they're not going to like, but which is a smart move in the end.