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Google Twists Knife In IE6, Pulls Support From Docs And Sites
- dangoldin 17y agoThe official link is here: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers...
- og1 17y agoI think phasing out IE6 is actually good for MS as well.
- nathanwdavis 17y agoI recall reading an article a few months back that MS has begun their own campaign to get IE6 users upgraded (to IE8 of course). This is really not a big blow to Microsoft.
- julio_the_squid 17y agoI noticed that when I open IE6 for testing (using iesforlinux actually), about 1/3 of the time it redirects to an IE8 download page, rather than showing the home page I have set in the options. Also, some of MS's own pages on bing/live throw scripting errors in IE6! If they're not paying attention to IE6, I hope that means I don't have to any more, either.
- samuel 17y agoIf they would be serious about that, they would distribute IE8 for Win2k.
- middus 17y agoFor a ten year old operating system? Yeah, right....
- johnl 17y agoI would agree. I never saw so many bad things happen when my friends upgraded to IE6. It wasn't that IE6 was bad it's just a lot of things security wise came to a head at the same time and IE6 was sitting in it's path.
- olalonde 17y agoGoogle, I owe you one.
- jsm386 17y ago'We hear that Google will be phasing out IE6 support for the remainder of Google’s major products, including Gmail and Calendar, over the coming year.' That be would twisting a knife - and I would love to see it happen. Pulling support for some new features in Docs/Sites isn't that significant.
- danskil 17y agoDear Google, I love you. Signed, Web Developers Everywhere
- amalcon 17y agoI hate to be the detractor here, because getting rid of IE6 would be great for everyone, but do we really expect discontinuing Google Docs and Google Sites to have any effect on IE6 market share? They're mostly corporate users, which means they're probably using MS Office (and have a web team or contractor) anyway.
- openid_broke 17y agoNo, but this makes it just a little bit easier for web developers to convince their boss or client that IE6 isn't worth supporting.
- peter123 17y agoif they discontinue support for IE6 on Google.com home page, that would really kill off IE6.
- barredo 17y agoThat would hurt Google earnings a lot since IE6 is ~20% of global browser market share (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Msieshare1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Msieshare1)
- icey 17y agoWho knows how much it would hurt Google's earnings. These aren't people who are out buying new computers, who says they're clicking on ads? I'm sure that some are clicking, but I don't know that IE6 users are necessarily as lucrative to Google as users of other browsers.
- sachinag 17y agoI would bet you every last dollar I own that IE 6 users are, on average, the most lucrative users out there. You know how people here say "who looks at ads?" You can't click ads you don't see. And remember, standard user studies say that a large segment of Google users think the ads on SERPs are actually search results. In short, IE 6 users are dumber than users of other browsers and Google's revenue is juiced by dumb users who click their ads.
- icey 17y agoI know that IE users are more likely to click on ads, but I haven't heard much about which versions are more likely to click through. Most of the visitors I get to my sites via adwords are on IE 7 and 8; but that's just anecdotal evidence. So, if you've got something that says IE 6 users are more likely to click on advertisements than any other version of IE, I'd love to see it - maybe we should still be paying attention to them.
- glhaynes 17y ago
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jbyers 17y agoWebsites are built on standards. Standards make them usable across lots of browsers. IE 6 doesn't adhere to standards, therefore deserves no special treatment.
- prodigal_erik 17y agoIE 6 supports HTTP 1.1 and HTML 4. If your resources are completely unusable (not merely ugly) whenever optional features like scripting aren't available, maybe you can cost-justify not finishing the work, but don't blame IE when your resources don't even work in ELinks.
- ratsbane 17y agoEven IE6's support for HTTP 1.1 is broken. Sometimes it doesn't send host headers with redirects; there are several different scenarios in which it doesn't treat cache directives correctly; etc. Same with HTML 4. There's just no excuse for using IE6 or 7 in 2010.
- stanleydrew 17y agoWow, that's pretty bad. And this whole time I thought IE6's non-standards compliance mostly had to do with the broken box model and quirks mode...
- prodigal_erik 17y agoSo did I. There were so many complaints about frills you never should have relied on, that I never heard they got important things wrong too.
- dbz 17y agoNah, I'll blame IE when my site works in every other browser besides IE. IE doesn't follow standards. IE8 doesn't follow standards. Any argument you make about it being my fault is going to be wrong because IE just doesn't follow standards. And "optional" languages provide a(n) UI. You may prefer to not build those into your sites, but most of the development world would disagree with you.
- grandalf 17y agoIt's about time. If Google is willing to take a stand against China this is the least it can do back home.
- chrischen 17y agoThis for me officially means I no longer have to support IE 6 for my app. Whew, bullet dodged. Sure wasn't looking forward to fixing those bugs.
- coderdude 17y agoJust because Google did it on a couple of their minor properties doesn't mean doing the same won't bight you in the butt. Don't be foolish, they haven't discontinued IE6 support on their search service so obviously they still like having those customers. Edit: spelling
- chrischen 17y agoNo I'm not foolish! I want to help Google kill IE 6. Perhaps it'll bite me in my butt, perhaps it won't, but I think the last person to know that would be you.
- rortian 17y agoThe other day I found out that MSN games don't support IE6. Google and Microsoft are allies on this one.
- sorbus 17y agoSo, does this mean that Google will no longer be testing on IE6, or that they will actively block/disable their products on it?
- FluidDjango 17y agoWell, who is going to feel the knife is the IT departments that keep prohibiting FF, etc. on their employees' systems. ...and the poor slobs who got sold software that would only work via IE6.
- ratsbane 17y agoI was one of those poor bastards in a corporate IT department six or eight years ago arguing passionately that the standards were in the RFCs and not in "the way Microsoft does things" and we shouldn't design the intranet nor buy expensive products dependent on IE 6 nor rely on postback for GET requests nor etc., etc., and I was pretty consistently shouted down. Any schadenfreude I might enjoy now at the results of one or two particular projects I worked on are overshadowed by regret at missing what we could have done.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoIn such a situation your choices are either: buckle and become a cog; do it anyway and ask for forgiveness later, if anyone notices (good luck); get the eff out as fast as you can.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoIt's not really about all those enterprise-y intranet sites that "only" work on IE6. It's likely that the amount of effort necessary to make those sites work on IE8 is, on average, not that great. The problem is more the environment those sites were created in. Hidebound, fear-based bureaucracy combined with very little development talent. Most such sites are burdened by crushing change-control processes. Those change-control processes exist as a somewhat reasonable bulwark against the very real harm that an unskilled, talentless development team (which, sorry to say, is the norm in the enterprise) lead by unsophisticated, incompetent management can do. This creates a double-whammy for corporations who want to move away from IE6. In principle the work may not be that difficult or extensive, but the dev. team may be too incompetent to even be aware of what the right work is or what the risks are, and the testing process alone would be extremely costly and time consuming. Not to mention the tricky cross-coordination between multiple teams that may be required. It's a perfect storm of just the sorts of things that can halt enterprise-y organizations in their tracks. Note that the even bigger problem of updating all of the sites on the web so they worked in more modern browsers (even back in the day a multi-billion dollar problem) has already largely been solved. Because site owners knew they had no choice so they rationally invested enough effort into keeping up with the times as was necessary. It's not the size of the problem, it's the capability of the people and organizations tasked with solving it that's the problem.
- zebra 17y agoIE6 is slowly heading to hell. This is my personal wish.
- barnaby 17y agoABOUT TIME!!!!
- pxlpshr 17y agoi wish Facebook would follow suit and toss all IE6 users into their lite version.
- Groxx 17y agoI actually like the lite version more than the regular one. Apps bug the hell out of me. They're all noise in my signal-to-noise ratio, and I try to keep that as high as possible. Facebook tends to hit the extreme-low side. Heck, one of the first things I did when the news feed appeared on my home page was to hide it with CSS. I've been updating it every time I need to, and I'm ridiculously happy not seeing all that crap every time I need to check FB for messages (some people just don't comprehend email). Several of my friends use it too, and all have remarked how much nicer FB is without the feed.
- access_denied 17y agoThe irony is: nothing will put more cash in MS pockest than forcing those corporate lame-ducks to finally upgrade.
- Tichy 17y agoIsn't upgrading IE free? Or is it really old versions of Windows they run, that can't be upgraded? Which ones would that be?
- endtime 17y agoHow many of the people still using IE6 also use Google Docs? Aren't all IE6 users either in a corporate environment (where, surely, they have a copy of Office) or, uh, not savvy?
- yason 17y agoI'm kind of surprised that IE6 has actually been actively, not just accidentally, supported somewhere in the recent years. Microsoft has released two new versions after 6 so MS can't be blamed either.
- jackfoxy 17y agoAs usual the source document http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers... is more concise and wastes less of my time. Starting March 1 key functions may no longer work on IE 6 and other older browsers. This is good news for my company. It hastens the day when we can drop support for IE6.
- motters 17y agoGoogle doesn't need a knife, it needs a stake. IE6 is like the vampire of web browsers.
- richardburton 17y agoI wish Google could spend some of its ad budget on educating the general public on what a browser actually is. Their current Chrome adverts confuse people like my Dad.