Downtempo LLC: Our Fantastic Blog

I have been party to so many discussion about the pains of supporting IE6 that last year I wrote a detailed blog post about the subject, "So Why Shouldn’t I Support IE6?"

In that post, I made the case that supporting IE6 creates a very real, one time ROI by unlocking your website for 15% of the market.  On the downside, the return on that investment is declining over time, as IE6 bleeds market share, month after month.  To make matters worse, for a startup, there is an opportunity cost for that work.  Your resources would be better served to be refining your existing product to achieve better long term growth.

Clearly, as both a web developer and a businessman, I am not an IE6 fan.

So I was tickled to open up my inbox earlier this week and find this delightful letter from Google Apps:

Dear Google Apps admin,​

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.

Good riddance, IE6!