We have to say, you know the end is near when entire countries advise its citizens to move on, but the final kicker comes when Google says that after this date, it will no longer support the browser that's been with us for nearly a decade.
Google-owned YouTube will end support for Internet Explorer 6 on March 13, just two weeks after ending support on Google Docs. We suspect that YouTube will affect a larger portion of IE6 users and may be a final tipping point.
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Internet Explorer 6 was first released in August, 2001 and has since come pre-installed with Windows XP, which still accounted for over 60% of browsers world-wide in December of last year.
Ars Technica explains that Microsoft refuses to force its users to upgrade, even tho it "has stated time and time again that it wants to see IE6 disappear as much as anyone else". Currently, IE6 accounts for about 20% of surfers worldwide, with IE8 currently the most popular version.
According to Google, users running IE6 and other old browsers will still be able to watch videos, but will be shown an interstitial, as seen above, to remind them to upgrade every two weeks. Some features will not be available to these users until they upgrade. Google considers old browsers to be anything older than IE7, Firefox 3.0, Chrome 4.0 and Safari 3.0.
In other news, we can only hope that this is a signal that we will be seeing some cool new features rolling out in the near future for YouTube. And perhaps more companies will come out against the now-ancient browser and help to put it out of it's, and web designers' everywhere, misery.
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