Michael Wales

As web developers we typically fulfill a number of roles: developer, designer, marketing, SEO. Of all these roles nothing is more frustrating than the designer role, primarily due to the evil that is Internet Explorer 6. Thankfully, Google has taken a stance, primarily fueled by the recent Chinese attacks, and IE6 is going down.

Last week, on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, the Senior Product Manager of Google Apps announced that as early as March 2010 Google will start phasing out support for older browsers. The official lineup Google recommends consists of Internet Explorer 7.0+, Mozilla Firefox 3.0+, Google Chrome 4.0+ and Safari 3.0+.

Google also sent an email to all Google Apps for Domains administrators yesterday that clarified some concerns people had: this isn’t just for the enterprise users. Users of the standard GMail and Google Calendar will see functionality dropping off on older browsers as well. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. As developers, would you expect Google to maintain two separate codebases, one of which has inherent flaws that consistently introduces security vulnerabilities? I didn’t think so…

Is this the nail in the coffin that is Internet Explorer 6? I think so! With such a drastic change from one of the industry leaders, a company most people couldn’t dream of living without in this day, older browsers have no choice but to die off. Most people using IE6, or various other older browsers, aren’t doing so by choice – they are in enterprise environments in which they are not able to upgrade. These companies are now being told by one of the largest providers of software they use on a daily basis, the time is now! If more companies, and even developers like us, took a stand like Google is we would see an end to the 8+ year browser lifecycle that IE6 has enjoyed.