Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

TGDaily has an unattributed report asserting that

Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome that, according to the company, run the popular web-based email service “twice as fast.” Google also labels IE6 as an unsupported browser, meaning it fails to run some Gmail features

I’m unable to find any direct quote from Google to this effect – anyone got one? With 20% of users still using IE6 (which is only marginally less than all versions of Firefox, and close to 3 times Safari), it’s an interesting position if it is in fact the case.

There’s a reasonable case to be made that IE6 is disproportionally used in larger enterprises and organizations, for which Google provides commercial versions of Google apps like Gmail. It’s hard to imagine Google abandoning IE6 support for such users, even if the percentage of users for their free versions of Gmail, Google Apps and so on using IE6 is small and diminishing.

We’ll have some interesting related statistics from our recent “State of the Web” survey in the next few days, which among many other things asked designers and developers what browsers they used (and tested their sites and applications in).

I’m guessing that for mere mortals, support for IE6 in our sites and applications will need to continue for some time yet, even if Google feels they can start transitioning users to other browsers.