The internets sigh a deep breath of relief
At last, it’s happening. This is all over the Internet today, a message from Google to the world:
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.
Thank you, Internet God(s). Finally, we can all move beyond the giant obstacle to progress that is Internet Explorer 6.0 and build web apps that don’t have arcane code in that that tries to take a rocket engine and weld it onto a Radio Flyer. Cause it hurts so much to try to do that, and both the rocket engine and the Radio Flyer suffer in the process. (Note: I can’t believe I found a photo to fit my analogy)
Everyone’s been waiting to dump IE6 for a long time (I’d guess about 5 years) but hasn’t quite got the nerve to do it yet; thanks to Google’s lead, by the end of the summer I predict a giant leap forward in the speed, functionality and general usefulness of many web apps. Countless, countless development hours are now freed for actual, useful tasks.
We won’t see the next generation of web apps until HTML5 is fully supported across many browsers, which it currently is not (it’s not even fully released yet); however, Opera, Safari/Google Chrome (both WebKit-based) and Firefox 3 (Gecko-based) are leading the pack in supporting this new standard. Note that Internet Explorer is nowhere to be found on that list. Surprised?
