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Archive for the ‘Gmail’ Category

Google to drop support for IE6 and other dinsosaur browsers

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

A letter from Google informing the public that older browsers won’t cut it with Google’s new line of product enhancements, I welcome it, perhaps now we can be free of IE6 and other dinosaur browsers allowing the rest of us developers to leverage the exciting new technologies that have emerged in the last few years.


In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

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Gmail annoyances and downtime

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

I am beginning to loose faith in Google’s services, perhaps they are getting too big for their own boots and letting quality and engineering standards slide.  There was a time one could always rely on Gmail but increasingly over the last year there have been numerous Gmail outages.

At the moment I cannot send/delete/view emails on either my Google Apps or personal Gmail account.  As email is vital to my business this is most unacceptable, these problems have been going on for 5 days now, I tried the usual troubleshooting such as disabling Gears and Labs, alas to no avail.

In the end I fell back on my in-house SMTP server running in tandem with Gmail so I can at least get mails out to clients and other contacts.  Of course not everyone has the luxury of their own mail server and I really feel for those who are currently totally without email.

Any clients who are using Google Apps who are affected by this outage can contact us to setup a temporary webmail account on our data-centre so they can send out emails for the duration of this  outage.  You will still receive mail on your Gmail account, but can send from http://webmail.bluestar.ie.

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Offline Gmail access with Google Gears

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Google has announced offline capabilities for GMail, and also Google Apps. I just saw the option in my Gmail Labs today for offline access. This new feature makes use of Google Gears. I have yet to give it a proper field test out and about but from initial trials it looks impressive and has most features that one would need offline. It is ever so convenient to know that email is available offline and with the ever so time saving Gmail interface. Up until now the only way to get at email offline was by downloading via POP3 using Outlook, it is nice to be free from another Microsoft shackle.

Gmail offline will be rolled out in English language versions over the next few weeks. Once you see it, just follow these steps to get started:

  1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
  2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
  3. Click Save Changes.
  4. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline0.1″ link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.

Web Design Ireland - Offline Gmail access with Google Gears

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Advances in Gmail Labs

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Gmail Labs and Gmail in general is becoming more feature rich everyday.  Two new welcome additions are the widgets that allow you to get a snapshot of your Google Calendar and Google Docs, showing recent items in Docs and your upcoming schedule in Calendar.  Up until now I had been using Remember the Milk as a task list in Google.  I was aversed to using the greasemonkey scripts that were available to perform similar scorcery but it seemed too much like a hack for my liking.

With the new additions to Labs, the left nav panel does get a bit cluttered, still there are also labs features to re-arrange the layout of some of the other page elements such as chat and links, and I think labels can also be moved to right of screen.  There is also drag-and-drop available on these elements which helps provide a somewhat less cluttered workspace.  In Google Apps all these improvements make a super productive email environment, everything at your fingertips.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-calendar-and-docs-gadgets.html

On a sidenote Gmail for mobile has also been updated to version 2, now with support for Google Apps users.

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