@Ron
*"Giving up on IE8, however, is markedly different than dumping IE7.Last year, when Google said it would stop supporting IE7, that edition accounted for just 7% of all browsers used worldwide, according to Web analytics firm Net Applications. IE8, on the other hand, was the most widely-used browser edition in the world last month, with a usage share of 25%. Of those who ran one version or another of IE, nearly half, or 47%, ran IE8 in August.Windows XP faces its own end-of-life cutoff; Microsoft will serve users with that operating system's final security update in April 2014. But like IE8, Windows XP remains a major presence. Last month, Net Applications measured XP's global usage share at 42.5%, just behind the three-year-old Windows 7's 42.8%. Google is the first major online software maker to drop 2009's IE8 from a support list. Microsoft, for instance, has committed to supporting IE8 on Windows 7 until 2020."* Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231316/Google_to_drop_support_for_IE8_on_Nov._15 Some conclusions: 1. Sure the article dates from Sept 2012 but I think Google is likely to at least "go easy" on "not supporting IE8" if not postpone this completely because XP marketshare has not dropped enough since they made this announcement. As I doubt Google would skip on the relatively high number of users worldwide still using XP. Hwoever, they might be ready to fight this but you forget that they have a much higher stake in this: they are the only company which OS is the web. Educating users and pushing the industry forward is mostly helping Google. And this is fine... 2. Note however that when Google bought On2 and tried to promote WebM over H264... Still to this day Google wasn't as bold as to remove H264 support from Chrome (despite their announcement <http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html>to stop supporting that dates back from in 2011), YouTube, or Android even years after the acquisition. I am not 'daring' them... I am saying it's perhaps a good thing. Shortening too much the life span of digital products that we rely on will backlash. A ton of people use H264... few products/video players can probably read WebM. Few cameras -- if any-- can record in WebM. The whole industry of video/film is not at all WebM aware or ready (at first editing software won't provide WebM, hardware and software encoders don't support it...) 3. I think using Crosswalk with Polymer ( https://crosswalk-project.org/#documentation/cordova) is much better / realistic strategy to move the web and mobile forward. Recognize the past and help users with legacy hardware move forward without antagonizing them. The only other choice is that Polymer will first be a niche product (read the bestseller: "Crossing the Chasm") for the next 3 to 5 years before it can become mainstream. But it could kill it because in the meantime other techs will likely make smarter moves. Follow Polymer on Google+: plus.google.com/107187849809354688692 --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Polymer" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/polymer-dev/CABJiLVtPoh8x3Cy4eufwWU%3DUQQNzaaajyugEe017%3DoXsDYVFjg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
