Google Apps Dropping IE 6

This morning I found this email in my inbox. I use Google Apps to host my email and calendars, which works really slick and is fabulous. Here is the email:

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

For all Web Developers around the world, we should all be rejoicing! Having a large internet giant telling its consumers to “drop IE 6″ and other older browsers will make all our lives easy. I remember while working on a very large site, we used PNG images sparely for some background images. The deadline was extremely tight, but we were (barely) on schedule. Out of the blue I get an email forwarded to me from the marketing director for the client, and it went something like this:

Why are all the backgrounds looking nothing like the mock? Its all a funny blue.

Of course, the Marketing Director had IE 6. Whats worse, is that he was working for a very large computer technology business. We had to drop everything and apply ugly IE 6 hacks to enable PNG support. At the time, I tried explaining that the browser he was using was released while I was still in highschool, but he didn’t understand. Hopefully now the big internet giants will start telling people “Get off IE 6.” Once people adapt better browsers, the more we can do with the web.

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