Today I received an e-mail from the Google Apps team that said the following:

Dear Google Apps admin,

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…

So far so good, but here’s the real kicker

…Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

This is major. And it is so because of the massive amount of people that use these services could create the critical mass that will finally drop IE6 market share to an insignificant level.

If you’ve ever developed for the web you’ll know that everything is peachy until you test your site on IE6. Then you realize that you have to make a lot of modifications, tweaks and other superfluous work just to deliver anything that will look half way decent in this browser.

Web developers have been expecting this browser to die for ages. We’ve been hoping for the big players to drop support which it’s expected will force people and organizations to finally upgrade to a newer version or a different browser altogether.

There is also the added -and likely more important- benefit of ridding the Internet of the security risks associated with IE6. For some strange reason this hasn’t been as strong a motivation as one would expect for IT departments and end users to get on with the program. Let’s hope they find this move by Google compelling enough to do so.

Congratulations Google on doing something that should’ve been done years ago.

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