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Saturday 4 June 2011

Internet Explorer 6 Given Another Kicking

Sorry that it has been a while since my last blog posting, I've had very little time of late to do as much of my own development on soulfire.co.uk as I would have liked under normal circumstances.

Anyway, to my point. I woke up this morning and had a look through Google sci/tech news and came across a bunch of articles relating to the fact that Google have now finally dropped support for IE6, as I predicted that they would in my last blog entry. To be honest, it had to happen at some point anyway, but I really didn't think that Google would have done it so soon.

Great news though, as this may just be the tipping point where the estimated 11% according to Microsoft who still have IE6 can actually move on. My web stats put the figure at a far higher 20%. But well done Google! I bet all of the Microsoft sites still support it at the moment though! At work, I am currently in the site redesign process and I won't be giving it a second thought. In fact, I have my own Windows XP virtual machine that I use for testing sites with IE6 which I can now delete and have peace of mind.

The BBC have a fairly good article about Google dropping support and isn't a bad read.

What I do think is a little more dangerous is that there will be a loss of functionality for those who still use IE7, Firefox 3.5 and Safari 3. This could actually work against them, but hey they probably think that they are doing the right thing. The announcement by Google was made on their own blog.

This is all to push HTML 5, which will hopefully be the new standard in the not so distant future. So there you are, it is officially the start of the end!