A lot of web designers and developers have hated Internet Explorer 6 for years, it holds back progress on the web and is the bane of many people’s lives, so naturally we all get excited every time there’s some big news about it being phased out. Unfortunately, however, until now there’s never really been a definitive moment to call time on the browser. A significant portion of the world’s big corporations still enforce usage of Internet Explorer 6, as their old systems require features only it can provide, and even the news about Google account hacking being caused by flaws in IE6 were not enough to change that.
However, Google has now announced that it will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6, starting with Google Apps as early as March 1st. Google Mail and their other properties will also phase out support shortly afterwards. This strikes me as the moment that Google has decided that IE6 market share is no longer big enough to allow it to hold back progress any longer. This announcement is big enough that it’s one of the top three stories on the BBC News homepage.
So one question comes up. Does this mean that we, as regular every day web developers, can finally drop support for Internet Explorer 6 in our own work? My site doesn’t work in the browser currently, but purely due to laziness on my part, can I now say that actually, it never will? It feels like it could be that moment.
