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Google’s shocking announcement that it is dropping support for IE8

ie8 gets the bootOn Nov 15, 2012 Google will drop support for Internet Explorer 8, just 9 days after the U.S. election and 19 days after Microsoft releases Windows 8 and IE 10. Why? Because, with the release of Windows 8 Google expects IE8 to die with Windows XP.

This is big news for the web community and it makes me very happy! The trouble is that so many of our clients still use older versions of Internet Exploder. So with most of the web community chanting “What Would Google Do?” and picking up shovels of dirt to bury IE 8 along with the rest of the gang, I am left with a conundrum, who is going to tell our clients?

As an owner of a web development company I have experienced numerous times when I wished that we didn’t need to support older versions of Internet Explorer. I remember the glorious days reading .Net Magazine and discovering that the broader internet community was unilaterally dropping support IE 6. For those of you who don’t know, IE 6 is the scourge of human society (and IE 7 is a close second).

However, many of our clients hadn’t heard this glorious news yet, and still requested that we develop solutions that satisfied the unquenchable thirst of Internet Explorer 6. Those days are thankfully past. However, now it seems our clients are stuck with IE7. With Google discontinuing support of IE 8 it seems only natural that IE 7 will fade into oblivion, right? But by stuck I mean our clients are stuck!

So what do you think? Will Google’s decision rock our world? Or will the world remain largely the same, with late nights trying to make a perfectly designed circle fit the unforgiving squares of IE 8 and lower? Or do you think that Google should have dropped IE8? Why or why not?