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.