Death of Internet Explorer 6?

Great news I hear you all cry, or at least those of you who have to try to make websites work in this 10 year old piece of software.

Google has decided to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 in its Google Docs, Mail, and other applications. Microsoft has been urging everyone to upgrade to the latest versions of its browser and web developers have been cursing the older version for years.

So why is this good news?

One of the biggest headaches for website developers is the vast array of different browsers with streams of different versions of each of these. Not all of them work the same way which means that although your website looks great on your screen, someone else using a different browser sees a mess. There are standards of course that state how the browser should display a site but not everyone had been reading these. Over the past few years all the major bowsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari) have become more and more standards compliant (following the rules) so that now the latest versions will pretty much display a site exactly the same and support all the latest AJAX style coding that gives you your Web2 online apps.

Its just people who haven't bothered to upgrade their browsers who have kept us all having to manipulate our website code to make sure they can still see our marketing messages. With news like this we can now start to push these people into the modern world and use the full power of modern browsers.

So check your browser version and upgrade to the latest for the best internet experience.