We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products – as well as new Docs and Sites features – won’t work properly in older browsers.

Official Google Enterprise Blog: ​Modern browsers for modern applications

My question is how will Google implement this? There are two ways: The right way is to stop serving scripts and complex stylesheets to IE; you let the browser’s default styling handle rendering of the information marked up therein. Your application functionality fails gracefully, the data at the URL does not. The web—that is, this glorious mesh of interlinked, interdependent content—carries on.

The other way, of course, is to put a roadblock in front of users of specific user agents.

As far as I’m concerned, selective serving of CSS and JavaScript is simple enough; the second option should not be acceptable.

I hope that Google do the right thing (and that they open source the code so other sites can just drop the functionality in place.) Via: googleenterprise.blogspot.com.