MGR IT

Google is going to begin phasing out support for the Internet Explorer 6 browser as of the 1st of March.  Google Docs and Google Sites will not support “older browsers” after that date, which means anything before Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3.0, Chrome 4.0 and Safari 3.0.  Presumably other Google services will follow suit.

For anyone who keeps their systems up to date, this will have no impact, as Internet Explorer 6 is old (and seriously flawed) technology.  However, there are plenty of unpatched systems out there still using IE6 – over 10% according to the w3schools browser statistics site.

If yours is one of those systems, then you should make the switch now, either by upgrading to Internet Explorer 8, or by changing to another browser, such as Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

Internet Explorer 8 has been released by Microsoft in the past few days (see my previous post for info on the Release Candidate 1 version).  I haven’t yet had a chance to fully test the final release version, so at this stage, the warnings regarding upgrading still apply.  There are certainly some great useability benefits in IE8, but I found that RC1 broke some sites, even when using the IE7 Compatibility Mode. 

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Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) has been released recently, which means that the final release of Internet Explorer 8 will not be far away.  Having tested RC1 as well as the previous Internet Explorer 8 Beta, I can say there are some nice new features, but also some potential drawbacks to treat with care.

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