Sure, back then it included IE8, but the announcement specifically stated "Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release...", and with IE10 coming out, IE8 is no longer included in that category. When IE11 comes out you can expect Google will also drop support for IE9 and so on.
Part of the problem here is Microsoft's limit of IE9+ not running on XP. This is either a sensible technical requirement or a deliberate push away from XP, depending on your perspective.
Yea, in general, MS do not release new versions of IE for a Windows version in extended support, which for XP happened just after IE8 release in April 2009.
That's an awfully convenient excuse for shafting a very significant number of customers (or potential customers) running platforms that are far from ancient or unreasonable.
The current version of Windows is Windows 7, and as yet there seems to be no indication from Microsoft that IE10 will be supported on Win7. Does that mean if they release IE11 next year, my brand new computer that I buy tomorrow won't be able to run Google's web apps any more?
Even now, IE9 is not supported on WinXP, which was effectively the most recent acceptable version of Windows until around 3 years ago and is still within its official support period from Microsoft. More importantly, it's still in extremely widespread use.
I can't imagine a more compelling argument that Google could make to show that we shouldn't trust them or their cloud infrastructure as a reliable, future-proof service. Apparently they believe that grown-ups running professional IT departments with real support requirements should stick with centrally administered desktop software for anything critical. Not exactly the message you'd expect them to be sending if they want to encourage more customers, particularly the lucrative big business market, to migrate to their cloud services...
More recently (within the last month or so), there's been a lot of IT media interest in whether IE10 will be available on Windows 7, but recent platform previews seem to have supported Windows 8 only and Microsoft have been conspicuously quiet on the matter. Just google "IE10 Windows 7".
This isn't to say that IE10 won't support Windows 7 in the end, but right now the picture isn't looking good.
