Bye bye IE 6

Here’s your hat; what’s your hurry?

Google announced that, as of March 1, it will no longer be supporting Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) version 6. Introduced way back in the dialup days of 2001, IE6 lacks support for web standards as any web developer will tell you. At work we spend an enormous amount of time working around its, shall we say, eccentricities .

Most home users upgraded to IE 7 or IE8 long ago; these browsers are much more compliant. So why is IE6 still around? Well, I work for a huge corporation and I think our example is quite illustrative. IE 6 is on our core load and it is the standard to which we code, internally anyway. It will cost a fortune to test everything on IE 7 and 8 and rewrite where necessary. We can’t be unique in this regard. However, I suspect the Google announcement will be the catalyst that gets us really moving on this. Thank goodness.

The new minimum browser requirements in Google Apps will be IE 7.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 and Safari 3.0.

UPDATE Feb 17, 2010 – Got an email at work today saying that we need to prepare for the upgrade to IE 8. Coincidence? Maybe.

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