While this is an important distinction to make, I think that it doesn't understate the importance of this change.
I've worked for quite a few enterprise clients, and many of them are in offices working on old hardware and old software. The lucky ones get Windows 7, but I know plenty of people that are stuck on XP and IE8 (if they are lucky). Many of these users would love to use this Chrome or Firefox browser that every external company suggests, but their IT department won't let them install anything.
Now, if they can't view their Analytics reports without a modern browser, we'll start to see some changes.
It's a huge move, and should go a long way to getting these pesky users away from their legacy browsers and OS.
For those who aren't aware, IE8 doesn't support ECMAscript 5, which includes useful functions, such as: Array.prototype.map and Object.keys. The alternative to this is to use something like jquery's implementation of map.
Anyway, this is why IE8 in particular is a cutoff for compatibility. A lot of startups are not building their sites to be compatible with IE8.
Unfortunately, Android 2.3 is not fully ES5 compatible either. Since that's about one-third of all Android I doubt that ES5 compat was the driving force for this move. More likely it was the non-W3C event model and general non-use of IE8 for the reporting interface.
For many products, Google only supports the two most recent browsers versions for a given browser. IE11 will be out next month, so they should be dropping IE9 support too.
It's probably just a matter of cost to support that much legacy.
As far as legacy Android, 2.3 usage will probably drop like a rock over the next two years. A 3-4 year old cell phone is going to be really out of date.
Android users ought to just avoid the Android browser and use Chrome or Dolphin. I don't even understand why there is an Android browser. Android browser also has trouble with updating SSL cert authority information, and it's got issues with its touch implementation.
Android users on Android 2.3 can't use Chrome and Dolphin uses the native browser engine. I think Firefox Mobile would be your only option, but the performance has to be awful.
I believed IE8 reads XHTML just fine — are you referring to its inability to handle HTML content delivered with an `application/xml+xhtml` Content-Type header (IIRC)?
"That last point is very important, given that IE8 is still the world’s most popular browser."
Note that this is really not true. If you look at various[1] global browsers stats pages, you'll notice that NetApplications (where the author is getting his's numbers from) is the only one that puts IE at the top. If you look at the other, and based on my own stats, this just isnn't the case, and IE8 is not the most popular browser in the world, not by far.
Praised be lord of all code and such. I am not against IE8 - qualitatively it dwarfed IE6/7, but there are still way to many issues with supporting it. I am speaking from experience - I developed somewhat simple portal with a lot of AJAX/interactive elements. Getting all features to work on Chrome/Firefox was a charm, IE8 was harder. In the end I only managed to support IE9 and above.
I wonder what the corporate adoption of Win7+ is at this point?
Abandoning IE8 for various services will slowly start to hurt Microsoft as it forces people into using (probably) Chrome, or if not, FireFox. Especially once you are using Chrome, the lure of Google's ecosystem starts to become irresistable, and as Chrome use itself grows, Chrome as a platform becomes more and more attractive.
Of course this move in itself is irrelevant to that because it only affects such a tiny percentage of people. But as you add up a lot of niche services it will start to have a significant impact, I think.
This is interesting, because according the analytics I have access to, large institutions in my field (which is large in itself) seem to have standardized on IE8. I guess a lot of these shops went from IE6 to IE8, skipping 7 entirely. Its funny how long IE8 is sticking around and I wonder if its going to be the new "IE6" for some time.
XP extended support will end on April 2014. Antivirus will also cease support (most of them). This means that the day after, there will be a dozen of 0-days (currently being held) exploited in the wild.
I hope those organizations you cite have a plan for April. If they run XP, they must update. If they run Vista+, they can switch to a newer IE and use GPO to force IE8-mode for the intranet (if they wish so).
Most of these IE8 users seem to be Win7. IE8 runs on Win7, no problem. I also imagine these shops skipping 9 and jumping to 10 or 11 in the next year or so.
This is not really newsworthy. As jonknee helpfully pointed out, this is only the admin interface. And anyone still using MSIE8 honestly has no business in your Google Analytics!
This is of course only a good thing, making huge parts of the web essentially unusable for people that are still stuck on ancient browsers is probably one of the only ways to get them to upgrade.