Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Friday Google announced that it is phasing out support for Internet Explorer version 6, in a blog post titled, Modern browsers for modern applications. W3Schools.com reports that market saturation for IE6 was down to 10.9% in December 2009.

Ten percent is still a significant portion of Web users. And of that group most are likely from corporations who have applications dependent upon IE6 plugins. With these numbers, we at Capstrat cannot make the same decision as Google, but it is the right decision.

If the Web development community continues to support IE6, those users will continue to expereince the Web mostly intact. There's no real incentive for individuals and IT departments to upgrade. Until we break their experience through non-support, they will have little reason to upgrade.

Kudos to Google. Hopefully we'll be along soon.