Google deals hefty blow to IE6

Last Friday, on January 29th, Google made an announcement that could possibly change the landscape of web browsers.  They declared, that as of March 1st, the year of our lord, 2010, they will no longer provide support for Internet Explorer 6.  Halle-freakin’-lujah!

Let me be the first to acknowledge the fact that this won’t kill IE6 entirely.  I realize this.  For as long as large corporations are running expensive, legacy software developed for IE6, there will be corporate employees browsing the internet with the browser, which is two full versions behind.

According to w3schools.com, roughly 10.9% of users on the internet are still using IE6.  Why I think Google’s announcement is so very awesome, is that it will help force a good amount of the non-corporate IE6 users to finally upgrade to IE8, or at the very least IE7.

Google is citing the fact that support for IE6 has finally dragged their web application’s technical progress down far enough.  From the post:

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. [...]

2010 is going to be a great year for Google Apps and we want to ensure that everyone can make the most of what we are developing. Please take the time to switch your organization to the most up-to-date browsers available.

While I don’t disagree that IE6 is a hindrance to app development, I find it very intriguing that this announcement comes seventeen days after Google announced that their servers had experienced cyber attacks originating from China.  The data the hackers obtained were GMail messages from the accounts of Chinese human rights activists.  Whether this impacts your life or moral compass doesn’t change the fact that these e-mails were in fact taken from Google’s corporate infastructure.

Immediately after the news was released, internet security sites confirmed that the attack was done through a flaw in, you guessed it, Internet Explorer 6.  While Google’s announcement to end support for IE6 may have already been planned for March 1st long before the cyber attacks, I would have to believe there is some connection between the two.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 10:44 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.