Google Reader Revamps Comments, Drops Support for IE6, Gears

Google Reader is already the world’s most popular feed reader, but it’s still getting better, or at least evolving, all the time. In a latest round of updates, Reader gets a revamped and simplified comment system. However, it also dumps support for legacy browsers and, unfortunately for some, for Google Gears as well.

“Ever since we launched support for comments on shared items, one of the most frequent points of confusion has been ‘who can comment on my shared items?’ (or rather, ‘why can't I comment on my friends' shared items?’),” Google’s Mihai Parparita explained.

“Up until now, someone had to be in a designated sharing group to be able to comment on a post, even if you were sharing publicly. To make things a lot simpler, we've made it so that if you can see a shared item, you can comment on it,” he added.

Now, everyone can comment on publicly shared items. This makes more sense than the previous system, but it may also raise some privacy concerns. This is why Google is giving those who are sharing items publicly the choice of whether to continue to do so or make their shared items protected. Those who were already protecting their items won’t be affected by the change.

Google Reader is also dropping support for older browsers, specifically Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.0 and 2.0, Safari 2.0 and 3.0, and Chrome 1.0 through 3.0. The reason for this is practical and it’s the same one we’ve heard over and over, Google engineers would much rather work on improving the application than keep it working on the antiquated browsers. Plenty other Google services, as well as other sites, are dropping support for these older browsers.

At the same time, Google Reader is dropping support for Google Gears, which, among other things, provided offline access for users. Google is phasing out Gears in favor of standard technologies built on HTML5. The problem is, HTML5 is not yet ready to replace all of the functionality in Gears, so some users will be left out by this update. The only option for them, for now, is to use a desktop client to access their Google Reader account.