The date has been set, the axe has been raised and in a few months Google will be saying goodbye to IE6 support. Hallelujah!

For years designers and developers have despised the question “is it IE6 compatible?”. By far one of the worst pieces of bodge-job software that’s ever shipped from a company that’s also adorned our screens with such treasures as Windows 2000. Yah.

Pretty much every web designer in the world, myself included, has been urging the public to ditch this joke of a browser and please use something that can actually render a page properly such as FireFox, Safari or Chrome. Thankfully, Google is now joining the cause by ditching support for IE6 by axing support for the ancient disaster from Google Sites and Google Docs. The move is part of their “Modern browsers for modern applications” campaign, and rightfully so.

Nowadays every other website embraces some form of Web 2.0, AJAX is everywhere, even the most basic blogs have a touch of jQuery dotted around. Combine with that with how far CSS has come these last few years, making advanced designs designers never thought would be able to leave photoshop a thing of present day.

Since IE6 had such a big user base, largely in part because it shipped default with Windows for years, whilst designers and developers had the technology to create fantastic modern web applications, since such a vast amount of internet users were using IE6 a useful web app was often pointless as half the web couldn’t use it.

So what can we hope to see from this overdue change? With both the French and German government urging users to switch, combined with Googles latest move, we can keep our fingers crossed that this marks the end of a buggy, security-holed, designer-suicide-invoking era. With IE6 out of the picture, now approaches a time where we can look forward to more websites using Web 2.0 techniques without fear of alienating so many users, less grid based designs out of fear of compatibility issues and less designers with gray hair from stress.

Personally, I stopped checking my websites worked with IE6 a few months ago, more often than not the type of user that uses IE6 isn’t really the type of user I’m trying to attract to my blog. If you’re using IE6, you should probably throw away the AOL disc, snap the floppy diskette games in half and join us over in the 21st century with a nice modern browser like FireFox or Safari.

Unfortunately Internet Explorer still holds a few top spots in browser usage worldwide, if you know something using it however, do the world a favor and recommend a new browser.

Thanks,
Every Web Designer. Ever.