Google phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6.0 and what does it mean?

As a Google Apps admin I have received an email today about Google planning to stop supporting IE6 in Docs and Sites, starting March this year. They plan to eventually stop supporting that old browser on all of their services including GMail. The transition begins this week, as they will be displaying upgrade requests on said services to the users who still browse with Internet Explorer 6. What does it mean for Microsoft, Google and the Web?

As usual, fate is not without the irony. It was MS back in the days who called the shots on the Web. And it was IE6 which dominated in the browser wars. Today, we have many ways to browse, and it’s the web services that got centralized and dominated. And now Google makes the rules.

They got a valid point, with the development of JavaScript and much anticipated HTML5, holding back to IE6 is nonsense. I personally stopped supporting it in my development a year ago. My company did that too. And more are to come.

However, there’s also the other side. Still around 20% of all internet users browse using IE6. The numbers are in a constant decline, but that’s still a lot for 2010. The table below, taken from Wikipedia, clearly states one-third of Windows users didn’t upgrade to the latest Explorer. What were their reasons? Slow computers? Busy corporate admins? Unawareness?

Whatever it would be, I wonder if it’s ok to just leave them behind, in terms of corporate image. And, of course, there’s the third side called the Chrome Browser. Google has been aggressively pitching it’s latest and greatest desktop app all over the internet, using it’s own Adsense, as well as outdoors – on billboards, newspapers etc. They definitely go big with it and play for the win.

On one hand it might look unethical to push users to Chrome using their popular services, but on the other hand Microsoft did the same when embedding IE6 into Windows. MS, of course, got sued and paid a lot, faced a possible company division even. So how are Google actions different? Should MS be filing a law suite? Where’s the famous “do no evil”? (apart from the fact that I think it’s long gone :P)

It certainly will be interesting to observe the reactions to all this on the internet, and how it might be different from the MS scandal. Oh well. Business ain’t about sentiments, but money. And all the players know that for sure… What do you think?