Google fuels and advances the eulogy of IE6

While we hear a lot of noise about Microsoft Internet Explorer being evil, it still rules the browser market. Its share might be reducing but it still holds a comfortable majority.

Even on Oneindia.in majority of users use Internet Explorer (over 50%) of which IE6 is the most popular version. Not good. Indian surfers are not caring much about internet security.

Microsoft may be upset with China for fueling the demise of IE6. It all started with the alleged cyber attacks on Google from Chinese hackers.  The hackers exploited a hole in IE6 to harm Google.

Germany was the first government in the world to ever to warn its citizens from using “any version” of Internet Explorer, France followed suit..  Finally Microsoft released a patch to fix the bug in IE.  UK has downplayed the threat and our Indian government has absolutely ‘no comment’ to make 😉

In Europe after these warnings Firefox has increased its user base considerably. Firefox got  300,000 and Opera got about 20,000 incremental downloads a day.

There is a huge movement going on to force IE6 users to upgrade, rather to move to non-IE browsers (to be read as Firefox). Many sites have blocked IE6 users from using their site, something which no Indian portal can afford to do. Purists would like publishers to move to HTML5 but it is not easy to do until majority of users upgrade to the latest version of the browsers.

Publishers could use this script to warn their users if they are still with IE6.

We use Google Apps at Oneindia. Today we received an email from Google which read,

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.

With the popular services of Google not being made available to IE6 users the end of IE6 looks to fast approaching.  Google would wish they move to Chrome.