IE6 Is Almost Dead, Really This Time!

Google really knows how to make me happy on a Tuesday morning:

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. …

So now that Google is finally getting rid of IE6 support, the rest of the net will cave (if they haven’t stopped already) and if all goes well by the end of the year IE6 will be nothing but a story us geeks can tell over pint…

[joe] Oh, remember that time when I had to spend 3 days rewriting that great Javascript tool so that Neophyte Bob wouldn’t have to upgrade his nine year old web-browser?

[steve] 3 days! Meh, that’s nothing, try 5 days trying to get basic CSS2 to function properly.

[joe] Yeah, wasn’t there some sort of library we used called ie7.js to give it basic support?

[steve] I don’t think so, why would someone have to write a Javascript library for that?

[steve] Oh wait, yeah… that’s right, they did.