Over the past decade, IE6 has officially gained its reputation as the world's most hated browser. Developers and designers (like us) have long irked at the additional development time ineeded just to make the website display and behave right under IE6. One can only imagine how much unnecessary time in the development world is wasted on this aging browser (on our end, we spend on average or 20-35% additional development time to make our websites IE6-compatible).

While countless attempts had been made to kill off IE6, we think the closest shot will be the one made by Google. Although we heard news of Google discontinuing IE6 support for Google docs, we didn't expect them to act so soon. Here's an email received recently:

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

This is definitely something worth rejoicing in the Internet development world!