“The Office Web Apps Love Your Browser “

Unless you use Opera, Safari (windows version), Chrome and several others… not to mention IE6 used by more ‘Office’ workers than anyone.

The Microsoft Office team working on the new web version have announced in a very ironic blog post that the new service will only be supported via the following browsers

  • Internet Explorer 7 and 8
  • Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Mac and Linux
  • Safari 4 on Mac

They haven’t ruled out support for other browsers in the future and just say to “Give it a try … and let us know if you see issues”.

They do make a good point tho andstatistics wise they have chosen the most popular browsers used (although I would swap Safari for Opera in my list) and focused on them for launch support and the fact they have left off IE6 could be a blessing for all of us.

Microsoft Office is used by almost all businesses around the world at some point or another, most of which are also still using IE6 as their main browser for one reason or another (that’s a different argument for another day). By not supporting IE6 and pushing businesses to use the web version of office instead, they are in a great position to quietly force businesses to upgrade and join the rest of us in standards compliant (almost in IE’s case) browser world. whether or not the big cheeses will go for rolling out a browser upgrade or just stick to using existing versions of office will be interesting to see but I for one hope they do…

You can read more on this story by reading the microsoft office blog post by clicking the link above.

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