The findings were announced on Tuesday by Spider.io, a firm that specializes in detecting abnormal internet traffic. Spider says it has identified at least 202 websites where the vast majority of visitors are bots rather than normal human visitors, and that that every major brand engaged in automated ad buying has been paying to shows ads to the bots; a visit to one of the affected sites Tuesday morning showed ads from brands like Crest and Bank of America.

Bot networks, which are a collection of virus-infected computers controlled from afar, are not new and have long been used by hackers for malicious activities like password theft or espionage. In this case, however, Spider says this is the first time a bot network has been deployed specifically to target display ads for which unwitting companies have paid.

Working with media technology companies, including Boston-based DataXu, Spider studied traffic patterns and ad activity at numerous websites. Spider, DataXu and ad industry executives from two other companies who did not want to be named explained the motives and tactics of the botnet.

High-tech ad tricks

The world of “ad tech,” where companies use automated platforms to buy and sell ads in real time, is highly complex. It involves massive online exchanges in which publishers invite marketers to bid on their web real estate; the publishers — and various middlemen — get paid whenever an ad is seen or, in some cases, clicked upon.

While the exchanges create a more efficient market, they also make it easier for dishonest participants to enter the ad stream. Since marketers buy millions or billions of ad impressions at a time, it can be hard to verify if the ads appear before real people or in front of bots. As described in a Tuesday AdWeek piece, the ad exchange economy has given rise to “ghost sites” that appear to be normal websites but that may actually be vectors for fraudulent traffic.

According to an ad executive familiar with the Spider investigation, the 202 “ghost sites” that it uncovered include ones that sound like everyday health or consumer sites, like onlinesportskit.com and superstar-gossip.com; many of the sites, which contain a smattering of bare bones news stories, are owned by an ad network (a service that federates ad sales) called AlphaBird. The executive added that, in some cases, the site owners may be unaware of the suspicious activities on the site but that they would at least be aware of the surge in traffic. We’ve reached out to AlphaBird for comment and will update when we hear back.

So how precisely do the bots make money? According to the executive, the scheme is likely based around “re-targeted” ads, which are display ads that show up based on sites a user has visited already. For instance, a department store’s website may place a cookie on a user’s browser in order to show her an ad for a sale while she is looking at an unrelated travel site later on. In the case of the botnet, a bot will first visit the store site in order to trick the store into paying for an ad when the bot later goes on to visit a ghost site.

A visit to superstar-gossip.com, one on the sites associated with the bot network, on Tuesday morning showed ads from major brands like Crest, Bank of America and the City of New York. Here is a screenshot of the ads next to one of the site’s generic celebrity stories (I’ve added arrows pointing to some of the brands paying to be on the site):

In this case, the brands paid to show the ads to a real target — me. But, according to Spider, the vast majority of the time, the ads are being shown to bots instead and the companies are paying for that.

Finding the bots

In its article describing the botnet, Spider says it has been observing anomalous traffic patterns since last December. It says the individual bots that make up the network act like real internet users but that together they look suspicious: Despite the sophistication of each individual bot at the micro level, the traffic generated by the botnet in aggregate is highly homogenous. All the bot browsers report themselves as being Internet Explorer 9.0 running on Windows 7. The bots visit the same set of websites, with little variation.

Spider, which compares the botnet it found to large-scale botnets that Microsoft took down in February, also has created infographics, comparing regular traffic and bot traffic side by side. The upper slide shows the botnet’s clicks (at left) and mouse movements (at right); their distribution is unnaturally uniform unlike the real human click and mouse activities in the slides below.

Spider said the “click-through” rates for ads on the 202 sites was 0.02%, which is a normal figure for ad industry; it said the low click-through rate appeared intended to avoid drawing attention to the scam.

Christian Carrillo, who is VP of Innovation at DataXu, said his company supplied ad data for Spider’s investigation because it wants to help “purify the value chain” of online advertising. ”The industry will benefit from efforts by companies like Spider but this is a longtime process,” said Carillo by phone. He also equated problems in online ad exchanges with earlier efforts to clean-up desktop viruses, a process that took years.

Update: For further details about the sites involved and the advertisers who paid them: see More on the botnet scam.

(Image by Lukiyanova Natalia / frenta via Shutterstock)

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Well whaddya know. When you’ve been the subject of a lengthy antitrust investigation and you settle with the authorities by promising to clean up your act, then “accidentally” go back to doing what you were doing in the first place and you get caught, you might find yourself in expensive trouble.

That’s what happened with Microsoft and its bundling of Internet Explorer (IE) with Windows in Europe, and now we see the result: a €561 million ($732 million) fine, handed down on Wednesday by Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia.

That’s a lot of money. What happened?

Last decade, Opera complained to the European Commission about the fact that Microsoft bundled IE with Windows, to the detriment of third-party rivals such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Google Chrome. The resulting antitrust case was dropped in 2009 when Microsoft promised to introduce a browser choice or “browser ballot” screen, so when users fire up a copy of Windows for the first time and open IE, it will ask them which of the various browsers on the market they’d like to go with.

As part of the deal, Microsoft agreed to submit an annual compliance report to the European Commission. For a couple years, everything went according to plan, right up until Microsoft’s December 2011 compliance report, which assured Almunia’s office that everything was hunky-dory. Only it wasn’t: the browser choice screen (BCS) had somehow been left out of Windows 7 Service Pack 1, which came out in February 2011, and Microsoft’s report was false.

When the Commission found out in mid-2012 and opened a fresh investigation into Microsoft and its bundled browser, the company immediately confessed, blaming the BCS’s omission on a “technical error” that somehow went unnoticed for more than a year. Microsoft said it had pushed out the BCS software to the 15 million affected users as soon as it realized its error, but Almunia nonetheless put the company on notice that it could face a fine of up to 10 percent of its global annual turnover: around $7 billion.

So it could have been much worse. Why not the full amount?

According to Almunia, “such a breach is of course very serious, irrespective of when it was intentional or not, and it calls for sanctions”.

However, he said on Wednesday that he set the figure at the level he did — around one percent of turnover — because “once the breach was discovered Microsoft cooperated with us and provided information which helped the investigation”.

And that’s why this isn’t even a record for Microsoft in terms of EU antitrust fines.

Incidentally, Microsoft says it won’t appeal this time round:

“We take full responsibility for the technical error that caused this problem and have apologized for it. We provided the Commission with a complete and candid assessment of the situation, and we have taken steps to strengthen our software development and other processes to help avoid this mistake — or anything similar — in the future.”

Could Microsoft be in a similar situation again?

Tough question. The reason the European Commission came down so hard on Microsoft in the first place was that Windows was so utterly dominant in personal computing -– it really mattered if IE was bundled and the ordinary user may have been left unaware than rivals existed.

We can see the results for ourselves. Chrome is now the world’s leading web browser, ahead of IE and Firefox (which also benefited greatly from the decision). And if you play around with IE10, the most recent version, you will see an iteration of the browser that reflects Microsoft’s need to keep up with those rivals: the company was forced to be competitive, which is surely one of the key points of antitrust law.

However, times change. While Windows still dominates the personal computing market by installed base, the PC sector – by which I mean the hardware, distinct from the concept of personal computing – is unarguably in decline as the world shifts to mobile. So, while in the 2000s Microsoft was the titan stomping all over OS X and Linux (by market share), today we find Windows 8 battling it out against iOS and Android across several hardware form factors.

This matters because the core concept of competition law is what is known as “significant market power” – the European Commission felt it had to crack down on Microsoft because it had such power in the established personal computing market. Now it’s losing its grip on that power, and quickly.

We are unlikely to see antitrust regulators crack down on Microsoft, or indeed Apple or Google, in the same way again – at least the way the market is shaping up now.

Windows 8 is still an unknown quantity. Someone out there may want to complain that the iPad comes with Safari preinstalled and doesn’t prompt the user to install Chrome or Opera, but, while the iPad is the dominant tablet, it isn’t so dominant that it requires that kind of regulatory intervention. Also, the tablet market is in itself immature, so early regulation could be seen as distorting the market rather than protecting the consumer.

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“There is no way we can compete with those marketing dollars,” says Vishria, CEO of the company. So instead, they had to think creatively and find a new opportunity. And that opportunity, he thinks is on iPad. A recent study by JD Power points to tablet owners spending “7.5 hours per week browsing the Internet, watching videos, listening to music and reading books while on PC they spend 9.6 hours per week” doing the same thing.

The company is announcing a new iPad app, that essentially is a browser optimized around the touch and tablet experience.

“The browsing experience on the tablets essentially is the same as the desktop,” he says. Howes argues that just as the emergence of simpler visual interfaces helped personal computers get better, today we need to present a different visual metaphor for browsing. Typing a URL in the URL bar is essentially the C-prompt of the web, Howes added. The touch and visual nature of the iPad commands a more visual experience, and that is why they have built like a browser-as-a-reader that uses Pinterest-like boxes in a grid. It reminds me of Neiman Lab’s Fuego social reader.

How good is it really?

I have been using RockMelt’s new iPad app for a couple of days and while it delivers on what the company promises, it is still rough around the edges. You have an option to use the app in a non-logged in mode, but that allows you only to search and use pre-configured content packages. These packages include topics such as Design, Food, Sports and, of course, technology news. There are many sources within these packages. And you can search by typing your search query just as you do in Chrome or Safari.

However, RockMelt is more useful when you are logged into the browser using either your Twitter or Facebook account. I am a little annoyed by the amount of information RockMelt wants from Facebook and it makes me queasy. However, if you sign in, you are presented a lot of content that is shared by people who are in your social graph.

The content, which appears like a grid, comes with a bunch of what the company calls, emoti-actions such as Like, Want, LOL, WTF and so on. You can also share the stories via Twitter and Facebook. When you click on an article, it pops up in a plain white “reader” window much like it does on Flipboard or when you hit “Reader View” on Safari browser. The reading experience is pretty damn good, except if you are a publisher, then you are out of luck — Rockmelt totally strips out all ads. I feel the product needs to be smoother and they need to eliminate rough edges. Nevertheless, it is worth a try.

Interestingly, they have snuck in the follower-following model into their browser and it seems that they are building their own “interest graph” around content. I think it is a smart move. Also, in the beta version of the software I saw a way for promoted content to be injected into the grid — a very natural and sound way of attracting advertising dollars.

Web vs. the apps

When I asked Vishria if they were now competing with Flipboard, he said no: “Flipboard is targeting a more magazine style experience.” For me, however, they are pretty much in the same bucket because they are going after the attention we accord to reading time.

Vishria argues that since the web reading experience and our journeys on the web are highly individual and personal, that is one of the reasons why people should use RockMelt. It keeps traditional browsing behavior in place, while offering folks a new way to visually surf the ever-increasing amount on the Internet.

Fair point. Now the big challenge for Vishria and Howes is to find millions of people who are interested in using their browser-app.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

The quick admission and apology is likely to be an attempt to make that fine as small as possible.

As you may recall, Microsoft reached an agreement with the European Commission at the end of 2009 over the automatic bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. To satisfy the regulators, it promised to make sure Windows users got a clear choice of default browsers at the point of installation — allowing people to easily avoid IE if they wished. This was done through a so-called ‘browser choice screen’, or BCS, and Microsoft also agreed to submit a compliance report to the regulators every year.

The last of those reports was submitted in December, and in it Microsoft assured the EC that every Windows user was getting the BCS when they set up the operating system, so they could easily install browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer.

Except, it turns out, that assurance was not true.

On Tuesday, the EC revealed that it was launching fresh proceedings against Microsoft “in order to investigate whether the company has failed to comply with its 2009 commitments” – specifically, whether it was the case that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 did not bring the BCS with it. Not long after, Microsoft apologetically fessed up:

Due to a technical error, we missed delivering the BCS software to PCs that came with the service pack 1 update to Windows 7. The BCS software has been delivered as it should have been to PCs running the original version of Windows 7, as well as the relevant versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. However, while we believed when we filed our most recent compliance report in December 2011 that we were distributing the BCS software to all relevant PCs as required, we learned recently that we’ve missed serving the BCS software to the roughly 28 million PCs running Windows 7 SP1.”

Microsoft says it started distributing the BCS software to Windows 7 SP1 machines on 3 July, a couple of business days after “discovering the problem”. It also claims the software is now available for all new PCs bearing that OS and service pack.

The company has retained external lawyers to conduct a formal investigation into the “technical error”, and these lawyers will provide their report to the EC when it is ready. Microsoft has also promised the EC that it will extend the compliance period – the five-year period during which the company has to submit those annual reports – by 15 months.

“We understand that the Commission will review this matter and determine whether this is an appropriate step for Microsoft to take. We understand that the Commission may decide to impose other sanctions,” the software giant added in a quote that must send shivers down the spines of its shareholders.

Meanwhile, the EC – which was fully aware by today that Microsoft really had breached its agreement – used its statement to roll out an excellent impression of a ticked-off teacher.

“We take compliance with our decisions very seriously. And I trusted the company’s reports were accurate. But it seems that was not the case, so we have immediately taken action,” competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia said. “If following our investigation, the infringement is confirmed, Microsoft should expect sanctions.”

Microsoft and the European Commission have had a stormy relationship over the years, to put it mildly. The browser case was arguably the smaller of two antitrust investigations into the company, the other being the server software case that saw Microsoft hit with a $600m fine eight years ago, only to have much more added on top because it still refused to live up to its agreements.

Plus ça change…

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Great names do some of the work for you. They market your company just by being out there: Last.fm, SoundCloud, KissMetrics and Groupon all come to mind. One of my favorite company names in tech is Wildfire, a company that makes social media marketing apps. Once you hear the name in context, the name will forever be stored in your brain. It clicks because it contains a strong hint of what the product does: it makes your promotion spread like… you know what.

Most of the names out there are just OK. They don’t make your life any easier or harder: Highrise, Yammer, Spotify. But it’s OK to have an OK name.

Where you don’t want to be is in the third category — having a name that associates your product with the wrong things and acts as a show-stopper. Think Pen Island or a name I once proposed for a networking service – Loopus.in (which associates with lupus for anyone who has watched even one episode of House).

So how do you make the right decision?

I’ve recently been involved in choosing a name for a couple of startup projects, and it gave me an opportunity to try and understand how to do it better. Here’s what I found:

Decide where your name should fit

Will your name be descriptive like Internet Explorer and Facebook or abstract like Badoo and Skype (s MSFT? Most names are word mutations somewhere in the middle, like Klout, Flattr and Pinterest.

When you have a big marketing and media budget, you have more of a choice, but for most name hunters this isn’t the case — so homework is needed. The first step in the naming process is to do a few broad Google searches and check relevant directory/app store listings. You’ll soon have a good idea where you want your name to fit. If everyone is zigging with ‘awesome’ web 2.0 names, sometimes you want to zag and go for something old school like ITT Electron Tube Company. Other times you want to blend in, for example if you’re making a golf application, you might want to have ‘golf’ in the name somewhere. Then, of course, there are often SEO considerations to bear in mind.

Write a brief, and make sure everyone agrees on it

Unless you work on your startup idea by yourself, write the result from the previous exercise down. It’s also helpful to create list of words you want your name to associate with and stick it to your screen or wall until you’ve found your perfect name. For example: “instant” and “coaching” when you’re naming a real-time sports feedback app, or “news” for a content curation tool. 

Then make sure all the founders and stakeholders agree with the brief. One recent naming experience involved switching back and forth between names that contained a strong hint at what the company does and abstract names because one of the founders wasn’t quite sure at the beginning. It wasted a lot of hours for everybody on the team.

Don’t brainstorm

Perhaps it’s just me, but I have yet to attend a useful naming brainstorm. Time is much more efficiently used if the same people do some thinking on their own and then exchange their ideas via very short meetings and/or email. This allows for creative exchanges to happen, unlike “brainstorms” where someone is forced to write bad names on a whiteboard and others are forced to look at that person’s backside.

So instead of summoning everyone to a meeting, go for a walk or jog or swim or whatever, keeping the list of desired associations in mind. Say the words out loud, look for rhymes, synonyms, legends, stories and expressions that come to mind. Often the best ideas come when you’re not sitting by your computer and your brain is relaxed. 

Use generators and crowd sourcing – but with caution

It may be worth the time to check out name-creating services such as NameJet and Domainsbot. Sometimes you’ll hit the jackpot of discovering a great name which is on sale for a reasonable price. Wordoid and LeanDomainSearch are also worth a shot. 

Crowd-sourcing is not ideal for naming, because a few people spending a lot of time on a name usually yields a better result than a lot of people spending a little time. But it is much more useful when it comes to validating a name. Services like Pickfu allow you to get a second opinion quickly if you’re stuck between two options. If you’re looking for more in-depth feedback, you can set up a survey with SurveyMonkey and have your customers, followers or strangers over at Mechanical Turk give you their two cents. The main thing is not to ask your friends alone — your target group has a different taste and your friends are sometimes simply too polite.

Remember that the most important thing is memorability

Sometimes name searches end with one strong candidate which is everyone’s favorite — and the domain is available too, yay! More often than not you need to make choices and compromises. Do you go for perfect name with .me domain or the second best option with .com domain? One that passes the “I can say that over the phone without having to spell it out” test or the one that all team members prefer?

Jason Calacanis has written a great post about naming a startup where he concludes that being able to spell the domain correctly and having a short name are the most important criteria. In my experience the most important view of a name is memorability. Google has gotten pretty good at handling typos, and a bit of SEO work will land searchers in the right place even without a .com domain. If people remember your name, they’ll find you. If you don’t believe me, ask Buffer, AngelList or Pocket. 

Andrus Purde is a startup marketer and co-founder of Achoo, a network that makes people’s achievements show. 

Photograph of man with brain copyright Shutterstock/liveostockimages

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Why only sort of? Because of a complex patent case that — unusually — involves courts in both the US and Germany, which saw its verdict handed down on Wednesday.

That’s when Judge Holger Kircher of the Mannheim district court granted Motorola a permanent injunction against those specific Microsoft products because they infringed on two video compression patents that Motorola owns. But the ban won’t actually come into force until Motorola applies for that to happen.

Motorola’s not yet said whether it will take this drastic step, and it’s unlikely to do so soon. Microsoft knows it, too. This from their statement:

“Motorola is prohibited from acting on today’s decision, and our business in Germany will continue as usual while we appeal this decision and pursue the fundamental issue of Motorola’s broken promise.”

Confused? That’s not a surprise.

The underlying reason for this state of affairs is that the two patents in question are essential to the H.264 video codec — the same codec that’s used by the world and its dog. And when a patent is that important, it generally has to be made available by the patent holder to rivals under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

Motorola has lots of patents that are supposed to be covered by FRAND terms, but in recent years it’s been making a habit of going to its rivals and demanding royalties that amount to a chunky 2.25 percent of the sales price of products in question.

German courts seem more eager than most to allow FRAND patents to be used as legal weapons, as shown recently when Motorola got the iPad and iPhone briefly banned in the country. However, Apple and Microsoft complained to European regulators over the practice, and the result is that Motorola is now the subject of two official antitrust investigations.

The transatlantic connection

Meanwhile in the U.S. last month, a judge granted Microsoft an injunction and restraining order that prevents Motorola from enforcing Wednesday’s Mannheim verdict, which everyone was expecting (Microsoft even moved its distribution operations out of Germany in anticipation).

Because the two companies are duking it out over precisely the same patents in the US courts, the judge said it would be wrong for Motorola to take advantage of the German court’s sympathies before the US legal system can decide whether Motorola is playing fair or not.

On top of that, Microsoft is going to appeal the Mannheim decision. If Motorola wants to enforce the judgment in the meantime, it has to pay hundreds of millions of euros as a bond, which it will lose if the appeal prevails.

All of which is why Motorola only has this to say right now:
 

“We are pleased that the Mannheim Court found that Microsoft products infringe Motorola Mobility’s intellectual property. As a path forward, we remain open to resolving this matter. Fair compensation is all that we have been seeking for our intellectual property.”

Whether that compensation is fair or not, is now a matter for several very high-profile investigations to determine.

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The price tag is the best part

Somehow, OnLive Desktop is free. It doesn’t cost a dime to download the app from the App Store, and there’s no subscription service to sign up for. The app also doesn’t require you to own a copy of Windows, as do Mac virtualization apps like Parallels and VMware. Windows 7 is already set up and running on OnLive’s remote servers. All you have to do is sign up for a free OnLive account (or use an existing one if you already signed up for OnLive’s gaming service) and connect.

Better than remote desktop apps, local virtualization software

Despite OnLive Desktop is working over an Internet connection talking to servers miles away (likely hundreds of miles in my case), it performs better than any remote desktop apps I’ve used on my own local Wi-Fi network. There’s very little lag; apps open and close speedily; and documents, spreadsheets and presentations are already setup by default to save to a synced folder, which auto-syncs at regular, frequent intervals.

In terms of setup time and ease of use, OnLive Desktop beats out both remote desktop apps and virtualization software running locally on Macs, in my opinion. This is especially true if your intended use is light editing of documents you need to access right away when away from home, since you can download from and upload to a web interface at files.onlive.com for your specific synced OnLive Documents folder.

Limited in scope, but should hit the right notes for most

OnLive Desktop has some limitations your own local installations of Windows won’t, however. Any changes you make to app or system settings won’t be there the next time you log in, for instance; OnLive does this to ensure speedy connections and easy jump-in, jump-out functionality for all users.

You also can’t install new programs or access anything beyond what OnLive provides, so this definitely isn’t a solution for Windows-based gaming. Still, those pre-installed apps include Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2010, as well as Windows Media Player and some basic utilities. You can’t access Internet Explorer, which would be a nice touch for people working remotely who have to access IE-only enterprise dashboards, for instance.

Finally, there’s the issue of not being able to use the iPad’s own software keyboard. Instead, you’ll get the Windows 7 on-screen keyboard. It pales in comparison to the Apple version, but it’s usable nonetheless. Also, know that if you exit the app mid-edit, you won’t be able to save your document when you jump back in, even if it resumes with the document open.

Despite those limitations, OnLive probably provides what the vast majority of its target audience requires: a quick and easy way to edit Office docs on the go. The extremely high-quality Windows Media Player streaming playback and other perks like the ability to use the touch-optimized Microsoft Surface Collage app, are just are icing on the cake.

Microsoft’s Office iPad apps are here

With Bluetooth keyboard support and the ability to connect over 3G (OnLive disconnects you after 10 minutes when connected this way, but that’s plenty of time to accomplish minor edits on the fly), I see little reason to go elsewhere for Office-compatible document editing. Plus, if this app eventually gets an upgrade to the tablet-optimized Windows 8, it should be even more touch-friendly.

Rumors occasionally crop up that Microsoft is working on dedicated Office apps for the iPad. With OnLive Desktop, I find myself happy to wait for Microsoft to take as long as it wants to get its act together.

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As with IE in desktop computing, mobile Safari is used for more than 50 percent of the browsing done on mobile devices (53 percent in August 2011, to be exact), and it has remained at or near that mark for many months now. Unlike IE, Safari on iOS isn’t bleeding market share; in fact, its usage is trending upward. In October 2010, Safari had 44.3 percent of the overall picture, which means it has grown by just under nine percentage points in less than a year, according to the stats from Net Applications. IE is steadily falling, losing ground especially to Chrome.

There’s more to the similarity between the two than just market dominance, however. Both IE and mobile Safari are default options on the hardware they ship with, but again, there’s a key difference: Apple really won’t let any other browsers play on its platform, even if a user does want to initiate a change. You can’t make any other browser the default options for opening links from other apps, and even the third-party browsers you can install from the App Store (like Dolphin) are actually just Safari at heart with feature and function changes. Microsoft got in trouble just for bundling IE with Windows 7 in Europe, let alone making it the only default option, so you have to wonder if similar action against Apple might follow down the road.

On the other hand, making Safari the only choice ensures Apple can guarantee a uniform browsing experience across all iOS devices it sells, and helps prevent security risks, something rival Android has had trouble with. You might think that because Android’s market share is still growing, it would be stealing some of mobile Safari’s thunder. It’s actually having more of an effect on Opera Mini, the second-place mobile browser, which has continually shed usage to the stock Android Browser. Opera Mini has traditionally targeted non-smartphone mobile devices, which might account for its early success and slow decline as people make the jump from feature phones to more advanced devices.

Apple is staying ahead in mobile browsing for one very clear reason: the iPad. Android has yet to have a hit tablet on its hands, and even cumulative sales of Android-powered slates don’t match Apple’s shipment volume, providing a huge edge to mobile Safari. My prediction? We’ll see Android pass Opera Mini and make a strong play for second, but Apple will continue to lead the pack for another year at least, and likely even beyond.

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As Google’s Venkat Panchapakesan noted in his post, Google Apps takes advantage of the newer technologies supported by more recent browsers, such as HTML5, to power some of its advanced features, like drag-and-drop file uploads. Maintaining support for older browsers that don’t include these newer technologies, or only have partial implementation, means not being able to implement certain features, or having to invest considerable engineering efforts to produce workarounds in order to implement them. As more vendors come to rely on the capabilities and power offered by HTML5 and related technologies to produce web apps that can match the power and functionality offered by desktop applications, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more web apps going down this route.

It’s probably not a decision Google took lightly, as this change will affect a significant number of Google Apps users. Taking a look at WebWorkerDaily’s stats, for example, shows that a small percentage of users do continue to use the older browser versions affected. However, as Google will simply stop testing new features and bug fixes in unsupported browsers, it’s unlikely that affected users will see any serious degradation in functionality for some time.

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