paulwoods.ca

Well it looks like Google is going to phase out their support for Internet Explorer 6.  If you are still using IE6 then you should know you are using a browser with many well documented security flaws.   What you probably didn’t know is that a lot of web sites are phasing out their support for IE6 including Google.  Google says that  as of March 1, 2010, you will not be able to access Google apps with IE6.

Here is what Google sent me today:

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…

It is very important that you consider upgrading your Internet Explorer browser to IE8 (via windows update) or moving to another browser like Mozilla Firefox , Google Chrome or Apple Safari .  If you are working at a corporate office I suggest you consider a portable version of Firefox or Chrome from Portable apps which runs without the need to install anything to your PC.  You can install it directly to your USB drive or to a folder on your desktop.

I use a portable version of Google Chrome at my office for several reasons:

1. Google Chrome uses the proxy settings setup in IE by my IT team so I don’t have to worry about having to configure Chrome myself.
2. Google Chrome is based on Webkit, one of the best HTML rendering engines and it’s as fast as Safari.
3. If I open multiple tabs in Chrome, they all run with seperate processes so a crash in one tab only kills that tab and not the entire machine.  Also it has better memory managment then IE and Firefox and will not crash my computer.
4. I can run it from my USB drive and Google Chrome will save all my cache there so when i disconnect my USB drive, I leave no trace on the host machine I ran it from.
5. Google chrome has lots and lots of screen real estate.

So I don’t know if my solution is the one for you, I only know that everyone needs to let go of IE6.

Cheers, Paul