Google to end support for IE6
(+9 rating, 2 votes)

 Loading ... Posted by: Herb: Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 |  

The bane of every web developers existence has been ensuring that websites operate properly in all the major browsers.The browser that creates most problems (by far) has been Internet Explorer 6. Why? Because it does a poor job of  supporting HTML and CSS standards. While we can criticize Microsoft for even releasing a product that is so “proprietary,”  they have released multiple replacement versions that do a much better (if not perfect) job of supporting these standards. Unfortunately, too many users haven’t bothered upgrading.

As long as significant numbers of the user community use IE 6 we need to ensure that what we develop will work with this outdated and proprietary browser. We’ve recently done some analysis among a cross section of our clients and found the following browser usage:

Browser                Users

IE 8.0                      30%
IE 7.0                      29%
firefox                     18%
IE 6.0                      11%
Safari Mac                9%

While IE 6 is down to 11%, that’s still too significant a user base to drop support. What will it take for users to finally upgrade? A major player dropping support.

Thankfully, Google has now announced that they are dropping support! Hopefully, this will finally rid us of the ghost of IE 6.