Some time ago Google announced to discontinue the support of Internet Explorer 6.0 for most of his services. Now they have announced a date for that discontinue. The day we are waiting for is March 13, 2010. I couldn’t find out if users of Internet Explorer 6.0 will then be able to use the services.

As I mentioned in the post Internet Explorer 6 unter Windows 7 nutzen mit dem Windows XP Mode I still have a running Version of IE6 on my laptop. So as soon as the day has come, I’ll report about the usage of the services with IE6. On the YouTube home page users can find a notice about updating their browsers:

An interesting fact is that the order of the suggested browsers is randomly sorted on each update. That’s what they tried to force Microsoft to do with the browser choice on Windows 7.

But as not only Google announced to discontinue the support of IE6 and there have been many reports about security issues in the media, I hope that the Internet Explorer 6 will not survive 2010. Even the last admin should already have noticed that this aged browser has no future. And those companies that keep using the browsers because they use applications that have been designed for IE6 should ask themselves about the reliability of such a developing company as there are two following versions of the IE. There was enough time to update their applications for the new versions. Those of you who develop website will and spend the time of migrating a page from IE6 to IE7 will know that is isn’t a big issue. But optimizing a website for capability of IE6 is very hard and an unnecessary and time consuming job.

I my opinion the Internet Explorer 8 was a big step of Microsoft to the right way. Internet Explorer 9 is going to be a browser that can compete with other standard conform browsers. Let’s see how this goal will be kept in the future development of IE9. But migrating a website from IE7 to IE8 or later to IE9 will be much easier for web developers. And we can save a lot of time to do more interesting thing.

P.S. But enough of bashing the IE6. I have to announce that today I found the time to optimize the blog for IE6. All transparent PNGs have been converted to transparent GIFs. So all the IE6 users of my blog can now enjoy it in its whole beauty.