This has not been the greatest start to the year for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Days after news of the latest security flaw in Internet Explorer, Google is adding fuel to the fire by phasing out support for IE6 for two of its Google Apps products, Docs and Sites (which recently got an aesthetic upgrade).
For both the consumer and enterprise versions of Google Docs and Sites, the only browsers that will be fully compatible are Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+, Mozilla Firefox 3.0+, Google Chrome 4.0+ and Safari 3.0+. The phase out will take place beginning March 1. While you’ll still be able to access Docs and Sites from IE6, you will have restricted functionality and many features won’t work, making the applications for the most part useless. We hear that Google will be phasing out IE6 support for the remainder of Google’s major products, including Gmail and Calendar, over the coming year. This isn’t Google’s first move to phases out IE6 functionality for its products. Last July, the search giant began phasing out YouTube support for the Microsoft browser. For users of IE6, the online video site began pointing to ‘modern’ browsers like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 as alternatives. A similar prompt will now take place on Docs and Sites for users who are browsing from IE6.
For the most part, the tech community, including web developers and designers, tend to have a profound dislike of Internet Explorer 6. Obviously, the browse has many issues, including low performance and major security flaws. Even Microsoft itself, is recommending that all its customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of the browser which has better security in place. The main reason why IE6 is still being used at all is because of corporate IT departments across the globe needing to make upgrade decisions. Unfortunately, a number of these companies still have to use the browser because they have systems in place built specifically to run with it. To add insult to injury, IE6 continues to lose market share in the browser world.
And Google isn’t the only technology company that is looking to close off support for IE6. Digg has hinted at wanting to cut support for the browser too. I have a feeling that as Google joins the web in gathering pitchforks around IE6, more companies will flock to join the movement.
Google has started phasing out support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), following a hacking attempt that exploited an IE6 vulnerability, despite the flaw being fixed promptly.

From March 1 on, some services, such as Google Docs, will not work "properly" when accessed from the browser. Google recommends that both firms and end-users upgrade "as soon as possible". Google now only officially supports Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3+, Chrome 4+ and Safari 3+.

Hackers exploited a weak spot in Internet Explorer to find the contents of Gmail accounts of human rights activists in China. Following this, both the French and German governments advised that users should switch to a different browser until the flaw had been plugged.

Microsoft issued a patch quickly after the revelations, pushing out a scheduled update just under three weeks earlier than they had scheduled. The software giant normally issues updates once a month, but the high press coverage led it to run an unscheduled update. However, Microsoft admitted that they knew about the problem "since early September", and were planning to patch it in February, leaving the hole open for five months.

 Rajen Sheth, the Senior Product Manager for Google Apps, said in a blog post that the web had "evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice", and that "very old browsers cannot run many ... new features".

20% of users still use the browser, released in August 2001 in order to complement the then-new Windows XP operating system, including many governments. Microsoft will support the browser until 2014, although the browser has attracted strong criticism among people in the web industry. 

The bad publicity garnered from the attacks has allowed rivals, such as Mozilla Firefox and Google's own browser, Chrome, to gain market share, allowing the open-source Firefox, of which a new version (3.6) has just been released, to claw a 40% share, close to overtaking Microsoft's 45%.

Last July, Google also dropped IE6 support from the popular video sharing site, YouTube. Popular sites, such as Facebook and Digg, have also dropped support. IE6 does not support several key technologies, making compatible web-design hard to do. For example, it does not render partial transparency in png images, and many site designers must work around the fact that Internet Explorer 6 does not support many important parts of the cascading style sheets (CSS) family of standards, which is how the majority of websites are designed.