Google phases out IE6 support on March 1st!

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products – as well as new Docs and Sites features – won’t work properly in older browsers.

Mashable: Google agrees: IE6 must die

Now that’s some good news. However, to judge the usefulness of the phase out, we have to know how much of an audience it affects anyways.

Weird, I saw this earlier, and thought of posting to SP, but noticed it was already posted here … by someone whose name began with an H, and who quoted the full blog …

was moved out of this forum into another, and then this was posted and stickied to the front page :expressionless:

PS for what it’s worth, good job google.

Why everyone hates IE6 so much including Microsoft !

I suspect this has a little to do with the Chrome OS. Google needs the Chrome OS products to compete with the iPad, and for that to happen it needs to have kick butt word processing and spread sheeting which is more difficult when they need to support older browsers like IE6.

Finally. I know I won’t be supporting IE6 any longer for whatever I design or change on pages.

Not entirely surprising, after YouTube decided to drop support. I personally can’t believe Microsoft is supporting it until 2014. That seems a bit much.

The beeb has the news on its front page now: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8488751.stm

Didn’t see it. Probably because it was posted in the wrong forum :smiley: See, I only checked ‘industry news’. So anyway…

My view on this is that while it’s a solid move, it probably won’t encourage those entrenched users who still use IE6 because that’s what they’re comfortable with. Mainly because I don’t envisage them using google apps.

Bye bye IE6… please go now! :slight_smile:

According to W3Schools 10.9% of their users still used IE6 in December 2009.

I think what Google is doing is good. It should force a few more people to upgrade.

For all the “switch browser” and “drops IE6 support” I see, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single “upgrade your OS so you can upgrade your browser”.

I don’t know how companies decide when they need to spend money on upgrading their computer system. But it seems that there will either need to be an improvement in the economy or things will need to get very broken so as to force the poorer/reluctant holdouts to spend their cash or fall by the wayside.

Not to mention the necessary hardware upgrades to those computers. I doubt the company I work for is eager spend the necessary eight-digit dollar amount to upgrade all its hardware, software and intranet applications, just so that they’re able to access Google Docs.

It would be cheaper for a company to set up a file server and share their documents across their internal network instead of upgrading x number of machines to handle Google docs.

IE6 is considered to be a part of Windows XP so both will continue to be supported for the same time. Dropping support means no more security patches for XP and far too many people still use XP for them to do that.

Even IE5/Windows 2000 is still supported until 13th July this year.

Unless someone manages to convince everyone to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 (perhaps by giving everyone a free computer with it already installed) it is going to be at least a few more years before Windows XP use drops low enough for Microsoft to consider abandoning it along with its built in browser IE6. 2014 may even be a bit early given that Vista was such a disaster and that disaster would possibly delay people in deciding to upgrade to Windows 7.

That doesn’t mean that everyone else has to continue supporting IE6. Supporting it for security patches is an entirely different matter from supporting it from web pages.

And given that most economies have just emerged from recession, people are less likely to buy a new computer if they don’t need one.

Anyone thinking of dropping support for ie6 should consider who the end users of their site will be. If people in educational or corporate environments make up a sizeable chunk of their user based then ie6 support can’t be dropped yet as a number of them will use ie6 for older web apps.

According to w3schools (yes i know this will reflect just those who visit their site):

December 2009
Win7 Vista Win2003 WinXP W2000 Linux Mac
9.0% 16.0% 1.4% 61.6% 0.6% 4.5% 6.5%
Now unless you can prove otherwise you have to assume that them 61.6% of people using WinXP could be using IE6. Because IE6 also shipped with Win2003 the 1.4% of people using Win2003 could also be using IE6.

Not everyone is going to buy a new computer or upgrade their OS everytime a new one comes out, many will just stick with what they’ve got until their computer breaks.

For anyone who uses Google Docs with ie6, they can easily bypass it by using free office software (Open Office for example) and just email files between work colleagues and/or friends who need them. I think Google may possibly be shooting themselves in the foot a bit.

It was originally posted in this forum. I was a bit surprised when it got moved to Website Design since it has more to do with latest industry news. :smiley:

Google knows more about its users than we do. They might not even have a significant usage among the corporations, governments and schools that still have IE6 installed in large numbers.

That’s different than saying they don’t have usage among corporations, governments and schools. But clearly there can be two groups:

[list][]The government agencies and companies that can’t use Google Docs in the first place, because legal requirements in their industries mean they have a need for strict document retention, version tracking and access control policies. You can’t meet the legal requirements when your data is “in the cloud”, accessed by browser, and you don’t have physical access to where it’s stored.
[
]The agencies and companies that don’t have such onerous limitations on their business by nature may be less likely to be tied to old internal applications for the same reason, meaning they’re the ones less likely to still be on IE6 at all.[/list]

So if group #1 is the group that’s more likely to be on IE6, then cutting them off from Google Docs is no change at all, since they weren’t (and weren’t able to) using it anyway.

About 15% of visitors to my sites use IE6–or lower. :rolleyes: I don’t support IE6 on any sites updated in the past 2 years and I certainly don’t support IE5.

If you webmasters would stop supporting outdated and dangerous browsers, people would have no other choice but to upgrade. But since you are willing to do hacks and work-arounds–which you shouldn’t have to do–people can continue using something that is over 8 years old.

People use IE6 because webmasters support it and for no other reason. There are plenty of free alternatives available.

Any company still using IE6 is not a company I would want to do business with. Google learned the hard way: IE is woefully insecure.

IE6 must die!

Absurd. Windows XP is set to update automatically for most non-corporate users. Most people using XP use auto updates and have upgraded from IE6 long ago. Such as on the computer I am using right now. People using XP have other alternatives like Firfox, Chrome, Safari, etc.

There really is no reason not to upgrade except for a few corporate clients using modified IE installations or possibly crappy ActiveX objects, which most don’t.

I think you vastly underestimate how many people this covers.

Remember that there are over 6 billion Windows PCs out there. The small percent that are corporations still tied to IE6 by intranets and other custom software is still millions of people. That’s where a large part of the remaining 10-15% of IE6 users comes from. Change in this group is not going to be driven by what websites still use IE6 hacks or not.

Can you be sure that they all left auto-updates enabled?

I agree. A large percentage of those still using IE6 are locked into using it because their intranet requires it. As those companies upgrade to Windows 7 they will probably switch to providing IE6 via the WinXP compatibility mode for intranet use and IE9 for internet use. Only at that point will the number of IE6 users of the internet finally fall close to zero.

The other thing to remember is that Microsoft did place the IE7 upgrade in the automatic upgrade option but had to remove it again as it broke too many intranets. So those using IE6 can have automatic upgrade turned on and it still will not touch IE6. Therefore anyone who hasn’t manually upgraded IE on WinXP will still be running IE6 (as will anyone running Windows 2000 who did upgrade their browser from IE5 - since that is the latest version of IE that Win 2000 supports and Win2000/IE5 are still supported until 13th July).