Google recently announced that they will no longer support older browsers on Aug 1st:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13639875
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support-modern-browsers.html

For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

There is nothing worse than looking at the patching of code that takes place to support older browsers. If we could all move towards a standards only web (I'm looking at you IE9) then surely we could spend more time programming good web apps and less trying to make them run equally on terrible non standards compliant older browsers.

So when can the rest of us expect to be able to tell our clients that we no longer support older browsers? Because it seems that large corporates will continue to run older browsers and even if google chrome frame can be installed without admin privileges (it's coming soon, currently in beta) we can't expect all users to be motivated to do this.

I appreciate any thoughts.