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."

Comments

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: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.

No addons, No chrome

[egnop]

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

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: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. 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.