Internet Explorer 7 and now 8 have pretty much put IE6 to bed. It’s become useless with many sites killing off support or will be soon. YouTube is due to pull the plug on IE6 on March 13th. Many others are following suite. This is seen as the final blow to IE6, a once great browser that has been battered and bruised by allegations of security weakness and fierce competition from Google Chrome and Mozilla.
A Denver based design company are holding a funeral for the browser at their headquarters and they have built a website at IE6Funeral.com to mark the occasion. You can RSVP to the event on the site and those who are attending are encouraged to wear “funeral attire”.
“Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc. Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as “IE6,” is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.”
The nine-year-old Microsoft browser Internet Explorer 6 continues the unavoidable process of termination, now Google is sending to Google Apps admins the notification that Internet Explorer 6, among others, won’t be supported anymore.
But, of course, IE6 is not the only browser that is getting phased out by Google Apps. The only browsers that will be supported are: Internet Explorer 7.0, Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0, Safari 3.0; and of course any other superior version.
According to Google, one of the main reasons of this new adoption is that any of these older browsers does not include supported version of HTML5 or JavaScript fast processing. The first feature that will be affected: Google Docs and Google Sites Editor, that won’t be supported anymore by March 1, 2010. After that, the time will come for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Here’s the notification from Google:
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
(…)
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
