The debate has been going on over the last year or so about the continual support for Internet Explorer 6 – Should it stop or shouldn’t it. Finally this weekend, Google announced that it will begin to phase out support for IE6 as it identified the browser as vulnerable in the recent cyber attacks on Google in China. So it seems we have these attacks to thank for this.
Let me explain – As a developer, IE6 can cause all manner of issues and extra work, and when Microsoft announced last year that it would support it for at least another 5 years, I’m sure I wasn’t the only developer whose heart sank! To support IE6 when developing websites means a lot of extra effort, not to mention the fact that we can’t implement more up-to-date techniques without providing an alternative version for IE6 users.
Aside from this, IE6 has security flaws which haven’t gone unnoticed and it seems hackers made the most of these and were confident enough to attack Google.
So, this announcement from Google is welcomed by me and the rest if the developer community I’m sure, and it seems that now pressure is mounting for the browser to be phased out completely. Can we finally hope that that IE6 will be a thing of the past?
