The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Google yanks IE6 love from web apps

Google is pulling IE6 support from Google Apps, its online suite of office applications. On Friday, with a post to the official Google enterprise blog, the search giant cum world power announced that it will yank IE6 support from both Google Docs and its Google Sites wiki service on March 1. "The web has evolved in the last ten …

This topic is closed for new posts.
Si 1
Happy

Good

This is the first thing they've done in ages that actually fits their "do no evil" mantra.

Mike VandeVelde
Go

3 cheers!!

hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray! hip hip HOORAY!!

The time is long come and gone for that beast to put out to pasture. When you give a quote for web work and include a separate additional line item for IE6 compatibility, it can serve well to drive the point home. It's about as useful as to include a gopher version ffs. If people insist on using IE6 then how can they expect to get the same experience as in a modern browser. There is accessibility and graceful degradation of features etc etc of course, but only a true masochist would aim for anywhere near pixel perfect match between that monstrosity of a wannabe browser and anything a thinking person would use if given a choice.

Good news for a Monday - a high profile drop kick to that painful thorn in the side of everyone who has ever done any web work :-)

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Dead Vulture

"Yes, this means Google employees were running IE6 "

No, it doesn't. It means that some Google service users were running IE6.

And by the way, of course Google employees are most probably using IE6 -though probably not from "live" systems. Google core business is based on the www in case you did not notice. So they are probably running all the web browsers they can get their mitts on, including the whole range of IEs, of course. Running only their own browser would be incredibly stupid.

John Sanders
Headmaster
Reply Icon

Running only chrome? why not?

"Running only their own browser would be incredibly stupid."

No, it is called eating your own dog food. If you do not believe in your own product, who will?

This doesn't mean they should not try their products with other browsers, or design their products with other browsers in mind, but at least internally they should try to stick with Chrome as another way to truly polish and perfect their browser.

Could you imagine a percentage of MS's employees happily working on Linux or Mac OS computers while at MS?

By the way I do not like chrome I use FF & Opera

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Reply Icon

erm, exactly

"This doesn't mean they should not try their products with other browsers, or design their products with other browsers in mind"

To do that wouldn't they have to, erm, _use_ said other browsers? And quite extensively, even? Do not forget that I would expect a company _making_ a browser to study the competition's products rather closely. This includes using them a lot to discover any kind of undocumented flaws or features. Of course the use of Google's own Chrome might be recommended for any in-house non-tech browsing. But it wouldn't necessarily be a good idea.

"Could you imagine a percentage of MS's employees happily working on Linux or Mac OS computers while at MS?"

Not to mention Google OS. No-one want to be on the receiving end of a chair-throwing marathon. But the problem is very different: Windows is not supposed to run primarily on Mac OS or Linux machines. Google products are designed to run primarily on IE (even though FF market share is on the rise, the various versions of IE still have a very large advantage on the market front).

Michael
Reply Icon

yes I could

I happen to know of several people at microsoft and M$ sponsored labs who run Linux day to day. Not difficult to imagine really.

James O'Shea
Pirate
Reply Icon

Yes I can

"Could you imagine a percentage of MS's employees happily working on Linux or Mac OS computers while at MS?"

Actually, I can, easily. For just one example, each and every person in Microsoft's single most profitable division: the Mac Business Unit. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Business_Unit>. They all run OS X. They have to. Steve 'Monkey Boy' Ballmer wants to ensure that the hundreds of millions of dollars a year that the MBU generates is not cut off, same as Billy-Boy Gates before him.

in addition, there will be other MS employees in the various O/S and network divisions running OS X and assorted versions of Linux. How else will Mickeysoft know what to steal next?

Pirate icon, 'cause, well, it should be obvious...

Anonymous Coward
Thumb Down

They should have gone further...

Why support IE 7? It's lazy and helps perpetuate another awful version of an awful browser that needs to die and die quickly. They should have jumped straight to only supporting IE 8.

No balls, Google. No balls at all.

Al Jones

YouTube phasing out support for IE6 too?

Probably far more likely to have an impact is the banner that IE 6 users see when they visit www.youtube.com:

We will be phasing out support for your browser soon.

Please upgrade to one of these more modern browsers.

with logos for IE8, Firefox 3.5, and Chrome.

The Firefox logo says 3.5, but it links to the Mozilla website, which actually provides 3.6.

This banner has been up for a couple of weeks now. Obviously no-one at ElReg uses IE6, or we'd have read more about this move.

M man
Unhappy

arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Poor opera got forgot :(

Chris Lowe
Thumb Up

@AC 22:16 - no this is big cahunas

Given the hold IE6 has in the enterprise, I think that making this announcement at such short notice is actually quite brave on Google's part.

Hopefully now with Google leading the way it will encourage many other companies to follow suit and we can finally prise IE6 from the clutches of the enterprise and get on with writing better web apps.

Good riddance to IE6 you will not be missed.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
Reply Icon

No, it is cowardice

What is the point of dropping support for one woefully out-of-date and non-secure browser (IE6) only to continue support for another woefully out-of-date and non-secure browser (IE7)? They should have gone the whole hog and demanded IE8 as a minimum for people stupid enough to use IE.

Pigeon

This is a bit harsh

I just bothered to find out I have Firefox 2.0. Lucky I wasn't thinking of using google apps, or u-tube, as I have no video plug-in since upgrading from Netscape. If El-Reg continues to display ok, I won't be in a hurry to find a newer version.

James Hughes 1
Reply Icon

Odd.

FF is free. You could have the latest version, with bug and security fixes, and generally better usability. For free (excluding the 5 minutes it takes to install).

Why don't you upgrade?

This post has been deleted by its author

zake
Reply Icon

Firefox 2 has a critical, unpatched security hole

@Pigeon: I sincerely hope you don't use your Firefox for secure communications such as online banking. It (like earlier versions of Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5) suffers from a critical security flaw in the handling of SSL certificates, which has not been fixed in Firefox 2 since that browser was already unsupported by Mozilla by that time.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/kaminsky/

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2009/mfsa2009-42.html

GrantK
Coffee/keyboard

IE 6 at Google

Google probably had IE6 installed for the same reason we do. IE6 is one of our officially supported browsers and we need to have it installed to support it. People on IE6 have little or no choice. IE6 makes up 12 - 15% of our traffic in the week and almost nothing over weekends. This indicates that they use IE6 at work and something else at home. They are not stupid, they are just using what they have available.

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade
Reply Icon

Agree

Spot on - where I work every box is locked down tight and company policy is for IE6 only.

This is backed by a corporate intranet which only works on IE - even newly built sections which could easily have been written according to actual standards.

It takes and *embarrassingly* long time to get a page up. If I have a customer on the phone, I feel compelled to joke about it, just to fill in time. Come on computer, you can do it!

Grenade for immediate despatch to East Bentleigh, special delivery for whoever formulated that policy. And another for the person who perpetuates it.

theodore
Gates Horns

re: @Pigeon

Likewise, I checked my chrome version on this computer yesterday, and it was 2.0.somthing, because as as an early-adoption but also dont-touch-my-damn-machine-how-dare-you-upgrade-in-the-middle-of-my-project user, I disabled updating on it a long time ago.

I've added chrome to my list that includes windows (because I dont trust bill either)

stim

MS

i am a big MS fan, but really, i think IE6 should have been destroyed many, many years ago now...

Dave K
Grenade

The whole point?

Surely the whole point of dropping support for IE6 is that Google employees no longer need to run it. When their stuff was developed to be compatible with IE6 then obviously they had to use it for testing purposes.

Hence by ditching support for it, Google can now eradicate it from all employers' machines. Which is nice!

FFred
Coat

Bastard Google

First they don't even support Gopher, now they remove IE6 !

At least lynx still works. Hrumpf.

Mine's the one with the VT120 in the pocket.

mhenriday

If Mr Metz had done his homework,

he would have realised that given the fact that IE6 still enjoys a browser-version market share of almost 60 % (http://preview.tinyurl.com/ykde7bf ), it is hardly surprising that Google employees in China would have found it necessary to test how their products rendered in that ancient browser. Perhaps, if Google really does plan to leave China, such support will no longer be needed....

Henri

This topic is closed for new posts.