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Comment by apalmer | Hacker News Reader

Google may be continuing with the 'Don't Be Evil' motto but they sure ain't standing by a 'Don't Be Dicks' motto. What major software company announces a deprecation with 6 months of support. I have something going out relying on chrome frame plugin going out next week, now I have to go with my tail between my legs. Well lesson learned, can't rely on Google in the enterprise.

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What were you paying for Chrome Frame?

Sometimes, it makes sense to retire products. And if you're not making money on the product, then it can be expensive to keep supporting it. I think six months is still a reasonable amount of advanced notice. No matter what, a small minority will be unhappy.

I think the real lesson here is: don't build something serious on top of a product you don't pay for and you don't have any guarantees on support.

I understand this completely. But moves like this is why you see Internet Explorer 6 still in the wild. Because C-levels can be confident that Microsoft will continue to provide baseline support, security patches, and forever. My boss didn't even get annoyed, he just said 'too funny' and reminded me of when he was telling me to just build on IE7 baseline.

6 Months in the Enterprise world is a barely time enough to sneeze... Anyways I am fine, its a lesson learned.

Microsoft will continue to provide baseline support, security patches, and forever

Actually they're going to stop providing IE6/7 support and patches in a little under a year.

IE6 was released 11 years ago, which is beyond forever for a browser version to be supported. No other vendor that I'm aware of provides support for browsers from that era.

IE on Windows XP actually. IE follows the support lifecycle of the Windows version it is installed on since IE6 SP1, and IE 5.01 on Win2000 follows the support lifecycle of Win2000 too.

The sad problem is, if you want to build a product for large corporates, a lot of folks are still stuck on old XP workstations with the default software installed (IE7 if you're lucky), and likely will be well beyond the MS support window. This is just part of doing business in that sector, but I think we can all agree that having to build for IE6/7 compatibility stifles a lot of innovation.

Will Microsoft continue providing baseline support for IE6 indefinitely? I doubt it. The top Google hit for "ie6" is http://www.ie6countdown.com, which is Microsoft's own site for tracking and celebrating the death of IE6. I imagine that once those numbers get low enough around the world, they'll stop supporting it.

>Will Microsoft continue providing baseline support for IE6 indefinitely? I doubt it.

Doesn't matter, they already have supported it for centuries in tech years.

Six months in enterprise is not reasonable.

He is saying he just learned that lesson. Free Google software isn't a reliable foundation for a business decision. Compare to Microsoft, who have a track record keeping their technologies alive and supported for many years.

One wasn't "paying" with money. But Google wants to move all of IT in a certain direction (where cloud and web based technology is acceptable). Therefore Google provided the illusion that it's possible to mix ancient IE6-IT with modern Chrome web apps. Developers could feel save that it's okay to use modern technology and still be able to reach old shops. And old shops might have started to adopt modern web apps, also from google. Now they are forced to think again how to keep the old IE6-intranet running next to some Google Docs stuff they bought...

So Chrome Frame helped Google a bit to extend a certain market for them by a little bit. Google still doesn't get paid, but they certainly didn't do Google Frame out of altruism.

> Now they are forced to think again how to keep the old IE6-intranet running next to some Google Docs stuff they bought...

Since they already switched from supporting IE6 to using modern technology as if IE6 didn't exist, then maybe they just won't bother switching back. Maybe it will be more cost-effective, at least for some of them, to finally ditch IE6. And that would be a win. The cancellation of Google Frame may be what is needed to break the feedback loop that keeps IE6 afloat.

> Now they are forced to think again how to keep the old IE6-intranet running next to some Google Docs stuff they bought...

The Chrome Frame retirement announcement points them to a solution for that, Google Chrome for Business [1] with Legacy Browser Support [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/browser/

[2] https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/browser/lbs.h...

I was going to point this out as well, and it actually seems like a better solution. Default everyone to a modern browser with updates, and then throw them out to whatever you need to use for compatibility if needed.

Chrome Frame always seemed like a nasty hack which was unlikely to get much traction in companies that haven't updated from IE6.

>What were you paying for Chrome Frame?

With the virtual currency of trust towards Google as a competent solutions vendor.

The other lesson is: Use open source solutions. If a company drops support for something that's open source, you have the option to pay someone else (or DIY) to continue that support going forward.

Other comments here say Chrome Frame is open source, minus the MSI itself (just a "very thin wrapper"). https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome_fram...

> What were you paying for Chrome Frame?

They can't have it both ways: if everyone thought like that, nobody would have uses Chrome Frame.

> can't rely on Google in the enterprise

  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES 
  OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
  NONINFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS.

I think some people read that as "Hey, that's a nice software ya got there, buddy. It'd be a shame if your dependencies went away. Good thing I got this service contract right here..."

As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes the policy to never use 3rd party software without an explicit support agreement is quite sane. But this is also a good argument for why open source and minimal complexity are good choices.

Chrome Frame will still work after January, just it won't be updated anymore. I assume that means you can still rely on it for your product, no?

No IT manager would permit an unsupported browser plugin to remain deployed. Who's going to fix newly discovered exploits?

No IT manager worth its salt should be relying on a free, unsupported, 'as-is' version of a hack in the first place.

And even less something that was always intended to be a quick workaround for users under very strict (or lazy) IT organizations that didn't upgrade to a decent browser in years.

Kudos to Google for creating and supporting it, until now. Time to take off the training wheels.

the same IT managers that are "supporting" deprecated browsers and os that will never be updated anymore ? Who's going to fix newly discovered exploited ?

That's the beauty of Chrome Frame. In most cases, it gets "deployed" without needing any approval from IT.

Chrome for Business looks like a solid and proper upgrade path, but it does require a semi-progressive IT team.

Hah, this shows what you know! If a browser plugin for IE6 causes problems, we just remove more sites from the whitelist on the proxy! You can Google, but you can't follow any of the results. :-)

These are the IT managers who haven't updated from IE6 yet. Something tells me they're not really that concerned about security in the first place.

I learned this when they killed google gears.

Your lesson should have been made loud and clear by Google App Engine.

What do you mean? Google App Engine is business as usual.

App engine had a pricing restructure a few years back that destroyed it as a business model for a lot of users. The worst was on Python where the language was missing scheduling features needed to make its use affordable... particularly nasty when Guido was working at google at the time.

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