Google deprecating support for IE6?

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.

15 responses to “Google deprecating support for IE6?”:

  1. I for one, have found no browser that I liked bet­ter then IE6. It’s got a small foot­print (memory/​cpu) because it’s not try­ing to be an appli­ca­tion provider.. it’s try­ing to be a browser. The browser inter­face com­po­nents are small and out of the way. This main­tains the focus on the con­tent, not the browser. When I find a browser that I like bet­ter, I’ll move. So far, I have not. Less is more. Back to the basics, folks. A capa­ble graph­i­cal browser with a small foot print with the focus on con­tent. Browsers should not have self ego love.

  2. […] an increase in Mac OS X and iPhone usage, both of which spark increases in Safari usage. Also, with Google dis­cour­ag­ing use of IE mar­ket share will only con­tinue to go down, as it has for […]

  3. […] a bet­ter and more secure brows­ing envi­ron­ment). Thus, it seemed that com­pa­nies like 37signals and Google had to take the lead, hav­ing to pub­licly announce that they would no longer bother mak­ing future […]

  4. DOliva, what about mul­ti­ple tabs? And, on the sub­ject of tabs, I quickly fired up IE6 and did a com­par­i­son between it and Firefox (which is my pre­ferred browser). Firefox uses slightly more of the page due to the tab bar, but if you took that away it would use up less screen estate than IE6 (with the small icons option checked).

  5. I won­der, legally speak­ing, is it anti-​​competitive for Google to lever­age its monop­oly on search to push its browser prod­uct? It’s the same pat­tern as MS using its grip on the OS mar­ket to push other prod­ucts. Still, any­thing that helps show IE6 the door…

  6. […] a bet­ter and more secure brows­ing envi­ron­ment). Thus, it seemed that com­pa­nies like 37signals and Google had to take the lead, hav­ing to pub­licly announce that they would no longer bother mak­ing future […]

    • By:stevegmag
    • January 12th, 2009

    @DOliva: That’s a bunch of Hoo-​​HA! IE 6 needs to be retired for good after a seven year reign. It’s lack of sup­port for stan­dards has caused, god only knows, how many wasted devel­oper hours and dol­lars of those who employ them. If had a law degree I would start a class action suit against MS.

    While I under­stand that IE 6 was a major player in web his­tory, just imag­ine where the state of web design and devel­op­ment would be today with out all the wasted effort sup­port­ing, what is at best, a mediocre browser.

    • By:Art Yaffe
    • January 30th, 2009

    As of this morn­ing, I can­not use IE6 for Gmail. I have Firefox loaded, but I really don’t like it or IE7. I will use Firefox for Gmail when I need to use the web­mail ver­sion, but that’s not very often.

    • By:Attit
    • January 30th, 2009

    Can we please just kill all IE prod­ucts? They all suck and are the bane of every web designer!

    save a devel­oper, use a bet­ter browser!

    • By:Matt
    • July 24th, 2009

    I agree with all the devel­op­ers as I am one myself. To make web­sites work­ing in IE6 we need to usu­ally use the IE-​​specific com­ment tags which we should not use as this is con­sid­ered as “hack & slash” technique.

    And those bloody dou­ble mar­gins are basi­cally screw­ing every­thing up!

    IE6 should’ve died once IE7 came out on the mar­ket. Long time ago.

    • By:Rohit
    • December 9th, 2009

    There are t shirts com­ing out with quotes

    Seriously, you still you IE 6!”

    Its time to let the old once upon a time most used browser to rest

    • By:iso ka
    • February 1st, 2010

    ie sucks, use bet­ter browsers to save developers.

    • By:RWes
    • February 3rd, 2010

    Seriously, I like MS, Windows 7, IE 7 +, Office 2010 changes, & other MS Products. I also love my iPhone, use Chrome, Opera & Safari. I like to con­sider myself objective/​neutral; that said:

    IE 6 must DIE & I agree with the one poster about a class action, if it were legal ;). Having had to deal with CSS to just han­dle IE 6 related issues, I would be so happy to see that browser just disappear.

    • By:Todd
    • February 6th, 2010

    I used to be a web devel­oper as well. The cost of main­tain­ing sup­port for IE6 is extra­or­di­nary. It is sim­ply a hor­ri­ble browser that does every­thing wrong… and to sup­port it, you have to “trick” it into ren­der­ing your web­site prop­erly. Supporting IE 6, can kill weeks try­ing to fig­ure why it won’t do some­thing it is sup­posed to do.

    I applaud Google. Thank you Google. Flush this browser out of the sys­tem once and for all. IE7 has it’s issues too, but IE6 needs to DIE DIE DIE!

    • By:Esteban
    • July 2nd, 2010

    I agree 100% with DOliva. I mean look at IE6, it is the epit­ome of browsers: small foot­print (uncom­pared to any other browser includ­ing Chrome), amaz­ing Javascript sup­port (V8 has noth­ing on it), its lack of tabbed brows­ing stream­lines pro­duc­tiv­ity by main­tain­ing focus on cur­rent task (same rea­son that I still favor sin­gle core proces­sors over multithread/​multicore), its ren­der­ing is leaps and bounds ahead of webkit (in all aspects: adher­ing to web stan­dards, physical/​visual ren­der­ing etc..). I don’t hon­estly see why Microsoft made any browsers after 6, they got it right with that one.

    PS: I lied, thank you Google for finally tak­ing this sick browser out behind the barn for us…

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