SalesForce Will No Longer Support Internet Explorer 6

As you may know I’m not the biggest fan of Internet Explorer 6.0. It’s a very out dated browser that wreaks havoc on us web developers…meaning we still must continue to support it because a fair amount of users insist on using it.

This may all change soon.

I just received an email from Salesforce, a very well known Customer Relationship Management company, saying they will “de-support” IE6 (Internet Explorer 6) in the spring of 2010.

Why? The Salesforce team explained it well:

• IE6 is less secure. Multiple security vulnerabilities in IE6 have been exploited over the years. The most recent attacks against Google, Yahoo, and other companies specifically targeted vulnerabilities easily accessible in IE6 but much more difficult to exploit in IE7 and IE8—leading the Microsoft Security Response Center to recommend that users of IE6 upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer.
• IE6 is slow. Of all of our supported browsers, IE6 provides the slowest and least rewarding user experience for our customers.
• IE6 is a “last generation” browser. IE6 was first released in August 2001. As an obsolete, non-standard platform, IE6 is a difficult browser on which to develop and support the rich internet applications our customers have come to expect.

Google is also going to phase out support for IE6 in March.

Hopefully this is the beginning of a new trend.

Suggested actions to take

Upgrade your browser to IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Opera.