Google Kills IE6 Support

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If you use Internet Explorer 6 (or are forced to because a work/school computer uses it), then you’ll be out of luck if you like to use Google’s web apps because they’re removing support for the popular web browser. Google says they’re doing this in order not to have to spend development time on supporting “antiquated” browsers.

The decision to end IE6 support for Google Docs and Sites was announced back in January, but now the decision comes down that even Google Reader, their awesome RSS reader, will even be unsupported for the Google services. YouTube is also phasing out support for the old-school Windows XP default browser. These sites won’t block IE6 users, but users will be using them “as is” and Google will not be spending any development time checking for bugs or seeing if new features work on the older browser.

Most techies have moved on to Chrome or Firefox, and even the common computer user probably has upgraded to IE7 or IE8. But, as mentioned earlier, it’s possible that somebody is using a work/school computer that may not be running Windows XP on a Pentium 4, with IE6.

To be honest, Google isn’t just cutting support for IE6. Firefox versions 1.0 and 2.0 are being cut, along with support for Safari 2.0 and 3.0, and even their own Chrome versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 are being removed from the list of supported web browsers.

Google’s blog post announcing these changes was “Spring Cleaning” and they pretty much cleared out support for all the older browsers. Again, Google’s comments regarding these changes:

This will allow us to spend our time improving Reader instead of fixing issues with antiquated browsers.

Anybody forced to still use IE6 that’s going to be out of luck?