Blogger's Updated Policy on Web Browser Support

Both Blogger and Wordpress is among the most widely used web publishing platforms in the world. Although the free version of Wordpress does have its limitations such as, you cannot add adsense (unless if you're willing to share 50% with Wordpress) for instance but with Blogger (owned by Google) everything is free!.

But that's not to say that Blogger is perfect. For instance when considering the plugins and the various other third party tool for WP, Blogger has its limitations too but for starting a brand new website and if you can't pay for hosting (VPS especially, well no one is going to need it unless they have a certain amount traffic anyway) and won't have to even buy a domain name.... you can just keep blogging and blogging without spending a dime on Blogger!.

And also with Blogger you can add adsense easily + you can keep all the earnings to yourself (ahh what a relief :P) as well. But on the negative side, unlike with paid hosting the whole website is owned by the webmaster but with Blogger, although it hosts all your files, but Google/Blogger can take away your blog anytime they want which is one of the main risks.

And also when it comes to making decisions then as users there's very little that we can do because we actually don't own the "thing". So when you gain enough traffic and $$ ;-) perhaps it's better to switch to another publishing platform that you have the authority.

According to Blogger's latest official news update page they've made a decision to change their web browser support policy. According to this new policy, starting with August 1st, Blogger platform will no longer support the following web browser versions (including their predecessors).

*. Firefox 3.5.

*. Internet Explorer 7.

*. Safari 3.

The reason is simple. With the introduction of the HTML5 and many other new web standards the older versions of the web browsers aren't quite capable of keeping up. And few days ago they implemented the all new GUI which is still in the beta stage which shows their doing some heavy changes to the system in the coming months and perhaps the "old" version of the popular web browser may fail to keep up with those changes as well.

The policy has a bit of an aggressive portion which says that, Each time the developers release a new version of their web browser Blogger will update their system for supporting that browser but will also automatically discontinue to support the third oldest version of the same browser at the sametime.

For instance, the current stable (secure) version of the Firefox is 5. So according to this new rule, when Mozilla releases the Firefox 8, the support for Firefox 5 will be canceled automatically.

When considering the Google Chrome and Mozilla's followup (now they also release a new version around 3-4 months too) then within like 9-12 months a web browser version support will be dropped from Blogger which in my opinion is a bit aggressive. Anyhow as said we do not own blogger and there's nothing we can do about it. Only time will tell.