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 1^st 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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