I'm quite grateful to Google for this. As a web developer, I'd always hoped that some big industry player would start forcing people to use modern browsers, and now it's happening.

As small players, dropping support for older browsers kind of pulls us into the morass of a Nash equilibrium. Everyone would benefit if all web developers could agree on requiring modern browsers. We'd all be saved the pain of supporting old browsers, and users would upgrade because every site forces them to. But as an individual web developer, I can't very well just make that call and hope others will follow suit. Because until everyone else does the same, I'm stuck telling my clients they're giving up visitors with older browsers "for the greater good." Not workable. So my current best strategy is to support older browsers, and the same is true for each other developer. Yet as a whole industry, we'd be way better off dropping old browsers.

But a huge player like Google can afford to do it unilaterally. And when they do, they create an opportunity for countless small developers like me to do the same.

I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon just yet. I plan to embrace this cautiously. We still don't know when it will be safe for freelancers and small companies to drop IE 7 and other dinosaurs. But I predict that day will come much sooner thanks to Google.