Google apps drop support for IE6

January 29th, 2010

Google is apparently dropping support for Internet Explorer version 6. I am thrilled a big player such as Google has taken a firm stance into leaving IE6 behind.

Dear Google Apps admin,​

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.

Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

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Dealing with MySQL Date

October 2nd, 2009

Assuming you are using MySQL as your database a data type of ‘date’ is stored as ‘YYYY-MM-DD’. In PHP we can represent the MySQL date data type by using the date() function like so.


echo date('Y-m-d');
//Result: 2010-10-02

One of the stumbling blocks I ran into was having to convert a stored date in a MySQL database to a user friendly format. There is a simple solution to this which is the strtotime() function.


$db_date = '2010-10-02';
echo date('F j, Y', strtotime($db_date));
//Result: October 2, 2010

When converting dates for entry into a database, you will likely collect the year, month, and date from a form as separate variables. If this is the case you can easily convert the variables into a MySQL ready date by using the mktime() function.


$year = 2010;
$month = 10;
$day = 2; //notice the 2 is not padded with a zero
$db_date = date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year));
echo $db_date;
//Result: 2010-10-02

So there you have it. Passing dates between a MySQL database and your application should now be a snap. If you aren’t familiar with PHP’s date() function, go to the page and bookmark it now because I find myself constantly going back there.

Before I leave you alone, I might as well give you the PHP representation for a MySQL ‘datetime’ data type.


echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
//Result: 2010-10-02 00:32:15

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