Google Tells Users To Drop IE6

Kelly writes "Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome. Google recently removed Firefox from the Google Pack bundle, replaced it with Chrome, then added a direct download link for Chrome on Google and YouTube. Google's decision to list IE6 as an unsupported Gmail browser does not affect just consumers: Tens of thousands of small- and mid-sized businesses that run Google Apps hosted services may dump IE6 as well. What's especially interesting is the fact that Mozilla is picking up two out of three browser users that Microsoft surrenders."

YAY!!

[Anthony_Cargile]

I shall soon follow suite with a little browser sniffing on future sites I design! I can finally stop supporting that shitty browser after all!

Re:Makes sense

[h4rm0ny]

Yeah. Stinks of anti-trust. I can well imagine the condemnation if Hotmail subscribers were being told to ditch Firefox and go to IE7. IE7 being a more natural progression for users of IE6 due to familiarity.

Interesting.

[haeger]

At my previous job (fairly large company) they've standardized on Win2k on the clients. In fact they're still running it. Guess what browser is included? The client is heavily modified so rolling out a new one isn't an easy task.
From what I've heard they're little above 1 year in planning to switch to Vista, but since there are quite a lot of migration issues I don't see that coming soon. I'd say it's atleast 6 months away, probably more. The company uses some very specific programs written by people that might not be with the company anymore, and all those need to work for business to continue as usual.

So they will continue to surf the interweb with IE6 for quite a while. Other browsers can be installed but that is unsupported and might result in a call from the security department on why you use unauthorized software on your machine. You probably don't want that. And none of the internal applications work with anything but IE6 (IE7 is being tested with the vista change) anyway.

Large organizations are fun.

But you shouldn't read gmail from work anyway so that's not a big problem. As long as most other sites still work. Or perhaps they should use an "external browser" and one "internal" one. Hehe.

Re:Makes sense

[tverbeek]

To many people IE6 is the WinXP/Office2003 of browsers. It may be technically inferior to its successor, but it works the way they're used to, and it runs on their current platform. Microsoft has shoved a bunch of unwanted UI overhauls down the throats of its users with IE7, Vista, and Office2007, and I know a fair number of people who are sticking with the ones before those because of that. And if they can't (as Google seems to be telling IE6 users), then that's a good time to explore other browsers, other OSes, and other office suites.

No addons, No chrome

[egnop]

As long as there are no addons like adblock possible i'll be sticking to firefox...

Re:Interesting.

[xdroop]

Or perhaps they should use an "external browser" and one "internal" one.

You offer this solution in jest, but in fact it is what I advocate to my users.

When Chrome came out, I tried it, and was impressed enough that my personal browsing is now done almost exclusively with it.

However, I still have a bunch of old, stupid network devices and other random corporate applications that either insist on, or just plain work better with, IE as a browser. So my "corporate" browsing is done through IE.

It also makes things easy to separate out visually; ie the IE window is safe to leave up when the boss/customer unexpectedly looks into my cube. :)

Interestingly, this meant that for me, Firefox was the browser left out in the cold -- between IE and Chrome, I no longer need it. I still have it installed, for the one-in-a-$BIGNUM site which insists on it, but it practically never gets started. My usage of it is so infrequent that it seems every time I start it up I have to almost immediately restart it because of some upgrade it has done.

Re:Makes sense

[Firehed]

Precisely what about IE6 work the way it's supposed to? The plethora of rendering issues aside, it is by far one of the most unstable pieces of software I've ever used. And unless you dig very deep into the Windows processes and force it to run in its own process, it crashes your desktop when it goes down.

XP/Vista, fine. I prefer Office 2007's interface by far, but I've never had any memorable issues with any version of office, going back to at least the Win3.11 days (and for what I do, the functionality there is just fine 99% of the time). But IE6 is broken on so many levels that it's just not funny.

Chrome on Linux and OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

It's coming. Be patient.

http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/09/platforms-and-priorities.html [blogspot.com]

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice to compile wine under win2k and thus make available some apps like Chrome.

Iterate is human, recurse is divine :p

Re:Advertiser versus advertiser

[base3]

Amen. Thanks to Firefox, web "developers" who code for IE only now do so at their peril and I also remember the bad old days when this was not the case.

All is fair

[fermion]

Netscape did not play tough, and look what happened to them.

Google is becoming a company that we should all be worried about, but they are playing a predictable games. MS grew because it offered the cheapest product on the block that more or less worked. Google is doing the same thing. The problem is that MS is now that inefficient behemoth with a business model that assumes a cut of every PC sales and aftermarket revenue. This is an environment where all Google needs to survive is a fraction of penny from every hit.

Google now offers cheaper products than Microsoft, read free to the user, and few people seem to worry about the opportunity costs in terms of privacy and all that. This is in the same way that no one worry about the issue with MS in terms of being assumed a pirate rather than a paying customer.

Beyond all this, why would any sane person with a competing product want to have anything to do with MS. MS could come up with an update to IE tomorrow that would break google apps. We all know that MS has the motive, and the will to break other peoples software is well documented. This justifies asking people to move away from IE because the day that MS does break Google is the day that google will lose a lot of good will. People will blame Google and not MS.

Not supporting IE is a gutsy move. It shows that Google is willing to play hardball. It shows that google is no longer the feel good get along with everyone company, but a company that is willing to dominate and create monopolies. Good for those that want a competitor to MS. Bad for those of us that want a quality product delivered by a company that treats the end user as a customer, not just a proxy to earn third party money.

Re:Support YOUR users, not GOOGLE's users

[Anonymous Coward]

Not being able to create a website that degrades gracefully is the weakest form of web development.

You are one of those people.

Re:Advertiser versus advertiser

[gad_zuki!]

>IE7 has an Adblock Plus equivalent?

A lot of people just install a hosts file that has many ad servers pointing to 127.0.0.1. This is a cross platform solution.

Re:Who are they preaching to?

[MPAB]

My workplace hasn't upgraded to IE7 and many pages (including Google's) don't work properly or don't work at all.
I use Portable Firefox from my USB key or even from my user profile at the server. I had to use some tricks to get the proxy configuration, though, but it was 100% worth it and it even upgraded automatically to Firefox 3 without getting blocked by the proxy (which blocks .exe and .zip/.rar)

Re:Dear God Thank You

[r3plicant]

Yeah...as soon as I saw the headline I heard every web developer in the world say "yessssssss"

Re:Big business is slow to respond

[MPAB]

My bank's page works in IE7, FF and Opera; but I cannot log in if using Chrome.

Re:Makes sense

[Dun Malg]

And Windows 2000 was just a rebadge of NT with a shiny desktop...

Yeah, as a user of NT since the 3.51 days, I can say that there was more than just a rebadge and polish from NT4 to 2K(NT5) and 2K to XP(NT5.1).

Re:Advertiser versus advertiser

[shutdown -p now]

IE7 has an Adblock Plus equivalent? News to me.

Well, it may be news to you indeed, but IE7 has a full-fledged open extensibility system, which does of course mean that there is a [ieaddons.com] number [ieaddons.com] of [ieaddons.com] ad [ieaddons.com] blockers [ieaddons.com] available.

On the whole, with IE7 add-ins, it's quite possible to get IE to roughly the same level as FF or Opera, including all the nicer stuff such as saving/restoring tabs, inline search, and so on. The only thing that can't be changed is the crappy renderer, but that's a headache for the web designers, not for end users (and it seems that IE8 will fix that as well).

All that said, I'm still sticking to Opera for speedy surfing, and I do not intend to change that anytime soon.

Re:All is fair

[jeffbax]

I'm not going to get into your theory, but as a web developer, anything that gets people to move from IE6 is a good thing to me. Like MobileMe, if Gmail is going to be the next huge webapp that helps move the web to a baseline of IE7, I'm all for it. We need the big companies and apps to push the change otherwise it will never happen.

Re:Advertiser versus advertiser

[techno-vampire]

Any time I find a site that only works properly with IE, I send them an email (if I can find contact info) pointing them to Viewable with any browser. [anybrowser.org] There's never been a good reason not to make sites that don't work equally well no matter what browser you use, and, quite frankly, I'm tired of hearing about "but I've got to do it this way for IE." If you must do something special for IE, do it after you have it working in a Real Browser, not instead.

Re:Makes sense

[Ilgaz]

Leopard (or any OS X) is really different from Windows in sense of programming. Even Firefox people which uses multi OS frameworks are forced to ship FF 3 as 10.4+. Opera uses a totally different concept starting with Trolltech Qt framework so they are happily shipping to 10.3.+ but if you notice, they had to drop pre 10.3.x support.

That is the thing which pushes Apple ahead of everyone but same time creating problems in enterprise/business World. Of course nothing says a goodly written application without any massive deep level hacks won't run in the future. E.g. if you just change the new mail sound of it (which is a bit hack), even Eudora will work under Leopard.

Re:Makes sense

[rgo]

What? Microsoft always adds new libraries! But at least they backport them, not like Apple (eg: Win32s from Windows 3.1, Unicode libraries for Win 9x, Win2K SP4 included some features from XP, WPF for Windows XP, etc)

Re:Makes sense

[SuperDre]

What nonsense is this, why would you upgrade if all your needed software is still running. Because a newer version of say Office is out, doesn't mean you've got to use it if your old version still has all the things you need it doing. The problem with newer version is also that you need a complete new supercomputer to run the new application at the same speed as your old version did on you old computer and only have some new features that you propably actually gonna use (and mostly is already available in some other kind of way on your old version).. We still have clients working with windows95 just because they don't need anything else, they only need office95 for doing their letters and have a financial program that also runs great on their system, and even we use windows95 (ofcourse with all the latest patches including latest IE (5.x)) as a target for our software, because if it runs on that, it runs on every windows, officially we don't support windows95 anymore, but as I said if it runs on that it runs on everything.. Just as people say MS is pushing IE down our throaths we can say that Google is doing the same with their software and their choices.. a lot people just think you need to have the latest of the latest because it is better, now I can say for one that it really isn't.. IMHO it isn't progress to need a new supercomputer just to be able to run the same programs only newer version of it, it's just that programmers have become too lazy these days when it comes to performance.. and .NET is definitly a slow framework...

Re:Makes sense

[qzak]

OK I scanned all the comments, but I dont see it mentioned anywhere. I use IE6 at work, and I have Gmail, and I saw this message 2 weeks ago. It DID have a link to IE7. Unless they changed it later, the summary is very misleading, and several comments are heading in the wrong direction.