I know that this dates me, but I remember a time when IE6 was actually a top-notch browser – not standards-compliant even by the, as it where, standards ten years ago, but easily the best product on the market [1].
But IE6 is now long past its’ prime [2]. For years Microsoft let everybody down by not updating IE to modern standards and when they finally tried IE7 and 8 where so bad that one wonders why they have bothered at all [3]. Actually I read an article that claimed that the market share for IE6 is bigger than that of IE7 and almost rivals that of IE8.
The best way to make IE6 disappear is not to support it any longer, which I, as a freelancer, am in absolutely no position to do. But following some other companies now Google drops support for IE6 [4] and there’s hope that when the kraken spits something out as indigestible it will finally go for good, so this is very good news indeed.
- Actually the idea behind MSIE was probably to destroy the market. Inconceivable as it seems now Browsers used to be payware before a certain major company started to distribute theirs for free
- Wikipedia states that it has been introduced in August 2001
- Possibly because they needed to support people who relied on ActiveX-Implementations of one thing or the other
- As Ed in the comments pointed out the search engine will of course continue to work in IE6. But they are phasing out IE6 support for docs and pages and while they might support existing stuff for the time being they are not going to develop news apps with IE6 support. From a developers POV that's the important thing.
There is probably a difference in perspective – for me the “important bit” of Google is not the search engine but their apps and the code they share. I understand that my post is a bit misleading if one doesn’t read the linked article, but google docs etc will no longer be supported. This will neither affect the search engine (nor commercial users who propably would not entrust their documents to Google) but will hopefully prompt a lot of private users to upgrade when they can’t access services they’ve become accustomed to.
Comment by Eike — February 11, 2010 @ February 11, 2010 5:27 pm
Oh, no, it isn’t.
Fortunately, Google are only planning to upgrade some unimportant aspects of their website. The search engine, the important bit, will continue to function normally in IE 5 and IE 6.
IE6 is typically run on an older computer, that isn’t capable of running IE8. What Google is really saying is: we demand that you buy a new computer, and buy a new Operating System, and buy all-new Windows 7 software.
Well, no one in their right mind is going to fork out the cost of all that! Not because one search engine makes a trivial change to its website.
Although they might not like it, even if Google disappears tomorrow there are plenty of other search engines!
Comment by Ed — February 11, 2010 @ February 11, 2010 5:06 pm