Internet Explorer 8, which remains the most used web browser in the world according to Net Applications, won"t be supported by Google Analytics in the very near future. Google announced today that it will cut IE8 support from its website statistics product sometime before the end of 2013.
In a new blog post, Google said:
We decided to do this to both accelerate the pace at which we can innovate new product features, and to facilitate adoption of newer web technologies in the design of the Google Analytics product. Our ultimate goal is to provide a superior user experience for every GA user.
This decision means that website operators will soon no longer be able to browse and interrogate traffic statistics by viewing them in IE8. The blog post said that Google Analytics will still continue to measure website traffic from IE8 users.
While the announcement did not give a specific date for the end of IE8 support, it did say Google wanted to give its customers "more than 3 months" to prepare for this change. The latest versions of IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox will all continue to be supported.
Source: Google via The Next Web | Image via Google