San Francisco — Google has finally had enough with Internet Explorer 6. Web developers have long been advising Internet users to discard IE6 for years. But now, the search titan at long last decided to join the cause. Beginning March 1, Google has decided to phase out support for “Internet Explorer 6” on its Google Docs and Google Sites services, the browser identified as the weak link in a “sophisticated and targeted” cyber attack on the search engine, the company said Friday.
“Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers,” explained Google Apps senior product manager Rajen Sheth in a blog post. “We are also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites on March 1st.”
The announcement comes barely two weeks after Google threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market following severe cyper-attacks on its servers originating in China.
Hackers exploited a flaw in Microsoft’s IE6 browser to target the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists in the recent cyberattacks against Google and other U.S. companies, and Microsoft scrambled to patch the flaw in a rare out-of-cycle patch release earlier this month.
The apparent reason for taking this decision that older browsers like IE6, which cannot render modern HTML elements properly, a problem that can impedes the functioning of modern Web applications, for which Microsoft has since issued a fix.
Sheth suggested that in place of Internet Explorer 6, customers upgrade to Microsoft Internet Explorer 7+, Mozilla Firefox 3+, Google Chrome 4+ or Apple Safari 3+, or more recent versions of those browsers.
A Google spokesperson asserts that the two events are unrelated and that Google had planned to discontinue Internet Explorer 6 support before the attacks were detected. “It is really being done so we can continue using the latest Web technologies to bring new features to our users,” he said.
Following Google’s disclosure, the French and German governments advised their citizens to switch to a different browser until the hole had been closed. Those warnings have led hundreds of thousands of Internet Explorer 6 users to download Firefox.
According to StatCounter, IE6 has 18 percent market share among browsers.