Discussion on:

Google creates entrepreneur day, ends IE8 support for Apps

Opera. Windows XP users that have the need to access Google Apps might
decide to go with a more secure browser that still supports whatever operating
system they choose. Though it's more likely they will have Chrome shoved in
their face at every refresh of a page at Google sites, or Flash updates.

Good on you, Google. People (and companies!!) should start to realize that you need to keep updated and ensure you have the latest browser. You cannot keep using IE6 (oh yes!) forever, and software companies don't want to waste their time supporting these.

It doesn't matter.I have win7 and IE9 LOL. I also have a XP, but I think I can still access the google apps without changing the trident engine. I can assign this kind of websites to be always opened with firefox/chrome engine and keep IE as my default engine via Avant browser. No need to change a browser,very convenient.

the whole concept of HTML and its use was to be totally platform independent. What went wrong was that some proprietary companies made their browsers to NOT be platform independent sop they could better control the use of the browser and its performance. Instead of fighting that, many developers just accepted it and went with the flow - thus the issues with special needs of certain browsers. Then, to make matters worse, we had some proprietary companies introducing special programs to make the web pages fancier and the developers not only swallowed them whole, they started using proprietary software that made pages that we very heavily dependent upon that proprietary software to work, and thus also very browser dependent.

Well, it seems the developers now have to rethink and go back to what they should have been doing in the first place: - designing things to work perfectly on any platform and only according to the Industry Standards, then we wouldn't have this sort of special needs for browsers.