Google Apps No Longer Supporting IE6
Posted on 02. Feb, 2010 by Dean Whitney in User Experience, web development and has 0 Comments
Great news for the user experience community and everyone that uses the internet. As of March 1st, 2010 Google Apps will no longer support Internet Explorer 6.0 (IE6) as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. 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.
Why is this such great news?
For web professionals the need to make sure everything we design and build functions and displays properly in IE6 has created significant challenges. This increases the time and cost of projects and often requires sacrifices in terms of user experiences. For us IE6 is a dirty four-letter word. As we imaging how cool the project could have been – not only the reduced effort but the higher quality and additional features the extra time and money could have been invested in.
A sign of things to come
The fact that Google has decided to no longer support IE6 means that web professionals will have a stronger argument to follow suit. In the past as popular brands have adopted technologies like Flash, Ajax and RSS feeds it always validates the project recommendations (God forbid the client listen to the people they hired to do the work). I predict this change will dramatically reduce the anger and use of profanity by web developers.
Quality of Time Spent by Developers
Google Email Announcement
Here’s the official email announcement received by our Google Apps administrator.
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.
Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
Thank you Google Apps Team!
Do you have any IE6 horror stories to share?
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