Google recently launched a new site layout for it’s search results page. Google dropped official support for IE6 on March 1st, 2010. This meant that Google could rearrange the results page to be both mobile friendly (without switching to their mobile version, iPhone users rejoice!) and make the page much, much faster to render by the browser. In this day and age of fast, inexpensive computing, that might not look like much, but it’s still an advantage for mobile users, and lets face it, you’re probably still supporting Windows XP on your mom’s 6 year old computer, or trying to send links to your sister’s spam ridden and slow laptop, right? The less time we’ve gotta spend chewing on a page load, the better for everyone.
What does that mean for running a Google search from IE6? Observe (click for a larger image):
Ouch. This would be a reason all by itself that I would upgrade off of IE6. Google holds a good 80% of the search engine market share, and is no longer supporting ancient browsers.
Gutsy? Maybe. They might be losing out a bit on the small 17% market share that IE6 holds, but they’re paving the way to make the experience the best it can be for users of modern browsers. 73% of users are using either Internet Explorer 7 or 8, Firefox, or Chrome (all of which support the new and exciting html5 and css3 specs), and Google’s decision to drop IE6 support is making that experience better for those people, one small step at a time.
If you can’t upgrade yourself (your corporate IT department is restricting you, for example), please let them know that you’re missing out on a fast, impressive world wide web.
A short list of large and popular sites that no longer support IE6:
