Google Drops Support of IE6, L9 follows

Some of us got an email from Google this morning that was a delight to see. It said, among other things "...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."

Google claimed good reasons for discontinuing support of IE 6, including the introduction of HTML 5, but I still think the best reason was "browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers." That made me think of the question, "what browsers does Microsoft really support?" I've had hundreds of problems with Internet Explorer over the years, and I think I can safely assume that Microsoft could care less about that. If I started sending emails to Microsoft asking them to build a browser that actually understood CSS like the other top browsers, they would probably give me a response that was similar to the one that email designers got when they told Microsoft that Outlook 2010 is broken... that it's that way for a reason.

The way we build our pages at L9 is based on creativity, efficiency and common sense. Every time I build layouts I test them in what I call "the big four", which are Firefox on Mac and PC, Safari on Mac, and Internet Explorer 7 on PC. Other members of our team test some others like Google Chrome. A lot of the time, IE just doesn't get it, and the layout has to be revised in order to work in all four, usually compromising something about the intended design. It's for this and many other reasons that I always encourage everyone to use Firefox as their primary browser. Safari or Chrome will also give you a better experience than IE, but based on my experience, Firefox is hands down the most solid browser available on both Mac and PC. Ironically, IE still gets about 80% of the users on the web because it is the easy "status quo".

As web developers for credit unions, we face a lot of questions about which browsers are to be supported, and until today, we officially still supported IE 6 even though it is obvious that IE 7 is most widely used version of IE on the web. We have been considering dropping support of IE 6 for quite some time, and only supported it because some of our credit union clients were still running the old browser on their internal networks, so when they looked at their site something might have not displayed as expected.

As of today we have decided that any new sites that we develop will not be supported in IE 6. Thanks to Google for supporting our position. Maybe if we're lucky they'll help us out by dropping IE 7 next year.