A couple of years ago, it would have been unthinkable for any company to not use the support from Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), however as the popularity of Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome and even IE7 and IE8 has grown over recent years, more companies are jumping on the bandwagon and ditching this older IE6 browser for something a little more modern.
As a result of these changes taking place, search giant, Google has announced it will stop supporting IE6 as of March 1st this year. A blog post on the Official Google Enterprise Blog begins to explain. “We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.” Older browsers, according to Google, include anything prior to IE7, Firefox 3.0, Chrome 4.0, and Safari 3.0.
Some speculate that this could have been due to Google’s reaction to the recent series of Chinese-based attacks on Google when it was found that Internet Explorers vulnerabilities were at fault. Although we believe that this could have been the icing on the cake I think this has always been on the cards for Google especially as they have been phasing out IE6 from many of their other products like Google Orkurt and YouTube six months ago.
It has been reported that 13.5% of web users still use Internet Explorer 6, however maybe the news of Google getting shot the browser will be positive change for these users to change over to a more modern browser which offers them a whole host of better features and functionality.