Well…it’s another installment to the IE6 story. You may ask…what is the story? Obviously I have never told the story on eWebBuddy yet. But instead of going in the details for now, I will keep it simple and direct.

Story of IE6 – Simple & Short

IE6 or Internet Explorer 6 was one of most popular internet browsers which made Netscape Navigator history! Microsoft’s strategy of making browser a part of their OS was among the main reason of this success. But with growing times and as the web evolved IE6 came off as full of bugs and with very limited support. As Firefox gained popularity, CSS became the webdesign phenomena, IE6 lost its popularity among the developers and designers because of its limitations and requirement of going that many extra miles to make sure webpages worked properly on IE6 without any cross-browser issues.

Microsoft realized of IE6 shortcomings and resolved quite a few of them in the next versions IE8 being the latest. But since IE6 was available for free with OS, it was still popular among users and thus developers had to support it. They made sure their websites are compatible with the browser…but how long could they tolerate that. Gradually as people started using better browsers, developers started letting go IE6 support. Though IE6 still shares 18% browser usage, it is decreasing gradually for good. Check out ripie6 to learn more about this.

If you are reading this blog on IE6, I request you to upgrade to better browsers. I will soon post about the browsers you can opt for. My preference though is Firefox.

Google’s decision

Coming back to the main agenda of this post, now google has also decided to do-away with their support for IE6. They have officially announced that starting March they will not be supporting IE6.

This change will start with Google Docs and Google Sites. According to Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager’s blog, a lot of crucial functionalities will not work on IE6.

It seems this decision is a result of the chinese hacking activity that happened over Google Servers a couple of months ago due to glitch in IE6.

And I support google in this decision. Because we need to evolve and like Google and many others who are evolving, we will also follow them. Upgrade to a better browser today.

What do you think about IE6? Like it or trash it? Also, tell us if you have upgraded, that will encourage others to follow suit.