Google says NO to IE6 from 1st March 2010

After the recent attacks by China on Google it was traced that the problem was with IE6. IE6 was introduced long back when Netscape used to lead the browser market. Entrance of IE6 which was distributed for free with Windows killed Netscape's market and Netscape nearly vanished from the browser market. There was no competition to IE6 as it shared almost 99% of the market share. I feel this was the reason why Microsoft let it as it was and never improved it further. It was only when Mozilla jumped in the browser market smartly working on the security part of the browser which challenged Microsoft to enhance Internet Explorer's security.

Microsoft came up with newer version of Internet Explorer viz. IE7 and IE8 totally leaving IE6 buggy and full of flaws. Microsoft is still providing support for IE6 on the base that it still holds up around 20% of browser market share. I think Microsoft still wants people to use Windows 95 if they are not ready to upgrade whereas they should always ask their customers to upgrade. Atleast when the product is totally buggy.

After whatever happened with China, Google has decided not to provide any support for Google products on IE6 and want people to upgrade to latest browsers.

Google has decided to phase out support for IE6 on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor from March 1, 2010. According to Google after 1st March 2010 certain functionalities within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in IE6. Later in 2010, Google will start to phase out support for IE6 for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google has already started displaying message in Google Products for these old browsers explaining the change and asking users to upgrade their browser.