Google and IE6: Put the Champagne Away

Published 2 February 10 by Justin French

UXMag have just published a short post with the wonderfully luring and dramatic title Google kills IE6:

Google is officially phasing out their support for IE6. This means we can all start working on more important things rather than debugging for old and quirky browsers. I think champagne is in order!

I wish! Let’s go look at Google’s actual announcement:

So to help ensure your business can use the latest, most advanced web apps, we encourage you to update your browsers as soon as possible.

They’re dropping IE6 support for their most advanced web apps, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. They aren’t dropping support across every Google product. You can still go to google.com in IE6 and do a search.

The decision to drop IE6 needs to be made by each business individually, based on strong business intelligence and data. Google, of all companies, knows this.

How many IE6 users—the ones that won’t or can’t upgrade to more advanced technologies—do you think actually use Google Docs (an advanced web app) in any significant way? I don’t know, but Google knows, which is why they dropped the support.

The upside to all this is that there may be a few organisations heavily invested in Google that need to upgrade. There may be a few IT departments that finally get of their ass and upgrade their work stations.

This is progress, but it’s not magic.