Jaimie Dobson Internet Consultant

Google Spits Its Dummy Out

Internet Explorer, the decreasingly omnipotent web browser from Microsoft with its old version 6 has been causing Google some issues recently and as result the search giant has spat its dummy out and is phasing out support for the old browser.

The story started earlier last month when many of Google’s gMail accounts, run by Chinese human rights campaigners, were hacked using a security flaw in IE6. This led to Google threatening to withdraw from the Chinese market following the “sophisticated and targeted” attacks, which it said originated in China.

Microsoft, who apparently had known about the issue “since early September” 2009 reacted quickly to issue a security patch update. However this wasn’t good enough for Google and they’ve now stated that they’ll no longer be supporting version 6 of the browser after the 1st March 2010.

In otherwords, if you use Google products (gMail, Google Docs etc) or visit Google websites which includes not only their main search site, but websites such as YouTube (a Google company), Picasa and Blogger.com to name but a few, then don’t expect them to work or display correctly all the time if you continue to use Internet Explorer version 6.

Here’s what they’ve emailed their Google Apps users with on this matter;

“Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, 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.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team”

Oh dear! Toys definitely out of the cot on this one then!

Who Can Blame Them?

For those not in the know, version 6 of Internet Explorer is pretty old hat when it comes to web browsers and even though it was only launched in August 2001 and replaced by version 7 in October 2006, it is ancient technology when it comes to the Internet and as such it produces some strange results when used to view some modern coded websites.

So on one hand, a company like Google trying force the User to drop useage of version 6 of the browser is a good thing in mine and many peoples’ books. However on the other hand, as my day to day experiences demonstrate; IE6 is very much alive, well and kicking in many organisations such as government departments, the NHS and many large corporations and academic institutions.

Rolling out a software upgrade across such a large User network as the NHS is no mean feat and if such organisations are still running Windows 2000 as many of them are; then the browser upgrade will on the whole, only come during an operating system upgrade. A big job.

However I would say kill IE6 regardless!

Isn’t it time your Users were able to benefit completely from the full “Internet” experience? If the answer is yes, then it’s time for a change. At best switch to Firefox but at least get an upgrade, flaws and all, to the current version of Internet Explorer which is version 8.

You know it makes sense!

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Tags: Web Browsers