Google phases out support for IE6

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Leuck on January 30, 2010 at 2:35pm

Brian - I agree, but its a big deal for commercial uses. We stopped supporting IE6 for commercial sites and products under development in October. Its far and away the most costly browser to support for complex CSS / Javascript. It just doesn't make sense in terms of the numbers for development and QA. The number of users who actually buy things online using this 9yo browser is minimal, and those are the people who are the customers of our customers.

I'm for anything that helps push people off this horribly buggy non-compliant security nightmare. Yah Google!

Permalink Reply by Kevin Luttrell on January 30, 2010 at 5:12pm

LOL... IE version.all of them are total fail. I applaud Google for saying F.U. to Microsoft's navel gazing and refusal to comply with reality and web design and development standards. (everything should have square corners, no Javascript, no CSS, No Divs-- we dictate the rules). B-bye IE, not missed.

Yesterday I was literally asked to hack the z-index of my CSS to comply with IE6 because someone was using that failed browser and brought it up in a meeting under the topic of browser compatibility--how about only shoot photos in black and white because some people are color blind or refuse to wear glasses.

My solution was to go into her office and download the current version of Firefox. Problem solved--and she was amazed at how much better her website browsing looked..
Then I saw that Google news and forwarded it to someone else who was convinced that EVERYONE uses IE..Bleh!

I have some advice for all those Government Agencies-- get current. This isn't 1996. IE6 = Security Hole to be exploited by anyone with an axe to grind that likes to make worms.

I have no opinions on the subject, as you might notice. Good discussion, Gus!

Permalink Reply by Daniel Leuck on January 30, 2010 at 7:05pm

Those are good points Brian. I think the key is to clearly establish your supported browser matrix (OS, browser, min version) at the beginning of the project and ensure the business owners sign off on it. The larger the matrix, the more expensive and time consuming development and QA will be. In some cases, such as IE 6, the increase can be substantial, so you need a good reason to include it (such as your example of apps for government agencies.) At this point, for B2C ecommerce apps, I think its reasonable for most companies to drop IE6 support.

Brian Russo said:

I agree completely Dan. Just pointing out that government + similar stodgy enterprise are one of the largest remaining IE6 users. Problem is there are a lot of horribly written intranet web apps that rely on IE6, so google's position on this is rather irrelevant to them.

Really it comes down to the fact that IE6 was the browser released with XP (which was a crazy 8+ years ago), but IE7 "only" came out ~3 years ago, which isn't really that long for a lot of sluggish enterprise IT people. The real transition for such will come when they migrate to Windows 7 (since they're skipping Vista).

Whole fiasco of IE really pushes me towards decoupling browsers from OS'.

Permalink Reply by Gus Higuera on February 1, 2010 at 10:41pm

Looks like IE is top dog now with Chrome gaining ground according to this article