5 Votes
Finally, the Death of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6?
I just received an email from Google that brought a tear to my web-developer-eye:
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Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 |
“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. … 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."
Wow. I thought this day would never come. I personally hope this will begin to force all of those IT departments and software manufactures that went “all-in” on MSIE 6 to rethink their solutions.
My workplace just recently in the last year made MSIE 7 the officially supported browser for people using Windows. While still a step behind, it’s notably better than MSIE 6. I’m curious if any of you are still stuck with trusty ol’ v6.
Similarly tagged OmniNerd content:
- Hack Google Chrome OS for Pi, by iluvchiken 4 months ago
- Google Stings Bing, by VnutZ over 2 years ago
- Google Wave: Fantastic or Fail?, by Dereck over 3 years ago
- Sync Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, by Brandon about 5 years ago
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Exploit Programming by Jackson
We use IE7 at NASA (along with Firefox on our Linux side). But at my last job, we used IE6 and wrote web applications that had to run on IE6, because that is the only way several of our scripts would run… because they were basically exploiting security flaws in the browser. There was a big hullabaloo about the “possible switch” to IE7 and what it would do to the web applications in force for most of the company. The final decisions as of Nov ’08 (when I left)? Stick with IE6 because trying to come up with the right way of doing stuff would be far too much of a hassle. To be fair, these browsers only worked on the intranet with no outside access (except for developers [laughs evilly]). But still, having it be official company IT policy to use IE6 because of (as opposed to in spite of) the security flaws that exist was pretty entertaining.
IE6 lasted until 2009 for us by VnutZ
Only this past October did my company finally abandon IE6 …
It’s also still alive and kicking on my USAR computer. Interestingly, this is the first time I’ve ever seen an Army S6/G6 shop (other than me) actually kick out a configuration with any sort security settings enabled. Usually I’ve seen those fools just push out a system with everything set default.
We use MSIE 6 by Brandon
I work for Shell and we still use MSIE 6 … as well as Windows 2000. It’s painful. So painful.
We are, however, making the switch to Vista soon. I dread being bogged down by that OS, but being able to use a new(er) browser makes it worth it.
I got the same email by scottb
And I shed that same tear.
I build systems that talk to the Internet at large, so I have to support the majority of browsers actually in use. Mostly I just try to stick with the standards, then hack around whatever doesn’t work in IE.
The news that Google’s going to dump support for IE6 in GMail by the end of the year means that a pretty sizable chunk of the population is going to finally be motivated to get rid of it, which will be a big win.