If you are a web developer, you know the pain that is Internet Explorer 6. You know how hard and tedious it is to add support for IE6 to your web application and maintain it once released.
All of the recent browser improvements to Chrome, Safari and Firefox give developers the opportunity to create very rich browser-based applications leveraging HTML5 and JavaScript. The recent announcement from Apple that the new iPad will not support Adobe Flash say a lot, HTML5 is the future.
When the major browser developers standardize on these technologies, our jobs as web developers will begin to get a bit easier. I received an email from Google recently which reflects their stance:
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 announcement is actually huge, in my opinion, because IE6 is the single browser that haunts web developers daily. Once IE6 is gone we can settle down and forget it once and for all. Google has a nice advantage here, so many people use Gmail, Google Docs and other Google Apps everyday that they will be force to upgrade to a modern version of IE or switch to a different browser altogether, great for us.
The news here seems to finger IE6 but it also notes removal of support for other older browsers too. Good times ahead.