14 DAY TRIAL // Internet Explorer 6 doesn't have a lot of friends left and it's making new enemies every day. More and more websites are dropping support for the ancient browser, or contemplating it, and the web dev world just got a huge signal from Google which will no longer support IE6 in two of its most well-known products, Docs and Sites. The message is even clearer as the two services, especially Sites, are aimed clearly at enterprises which, unfortunately, still use IE in bulk.
"Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We're also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites on March 1st. So while you'll still be able to access these Google applications, newer features may not be available and some features may even stop working," Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, wrote.
The browsers that Google specifically lists as supported are Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Chrome 4.0 and above and finally anything newer than Safari 3.0. Obviously missing from the list is IE 6, certainly the biggest offender, but there are also a couple of interesting omissions. Firefox 2.0 for one, not a lot of people use it anymore, truth be told, but there are still some and it's certainly not as old as IE 6. Market share likely played a role in this decision.
Google's own browser gets it the roughest, anything below the latest Chrome 4.0, which only made it to the stable branch this week. Google doesn't put that much weight on version numbers, though, and the browser automatically updates to the latest version, so this shouldn't be much of a problem. However, missing altogether is Opera, one of the oldest browsers still in active development. While the announcement sounds pretty dramatic in itself, Google doesn't say that Docs will stop working in IE 6, or any other unsupported browser. Instead what it means is that the dev team won't test their new features and updates in any other browser than the ones listed. It may be that Docs will work great even in IE 6 and certainly in Opera 10+ for quite a while now.