Goodbye, IE 6. We knew you all too well.

Google's announcement that it will no longer support IE 6 for its Docs application caught our attention in a big way.

I've been saying for some time that IE 6 is holding back the web for its poor performance and standards compliance. Building an "IE6" version of a website almost as its own entity is downright evil — but so far, it's been a necessary evil. That may be changing in 2010.

IE 6's adoption rate Internet-wide has fallen to about 20% and the shrinking of its share seems to be accelerating. That's good news.

While we do browser check all of our sites for IE 6 as a standard part of our service, 2010 will be the last year we do this. Starting in 2011, IE 6 compatibility will be a scope add-on and cost additional. We're very interested in creating an incentive to leave behind IE 6 because it will mean less QA, faster deployment, and better websites.

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