Beginning March 1, Google will terminate support and development on Internet Explorer 6 —for its many web applications, including Gmail, Docs, Calendar and many other “cloud-based” web applications yet to be named.
The official word from Google came January 29, 2010 in this blog post
… the death of IE6 should not be mourning call, but instead the celebration of a pinnacle moment in the internet’s short historical timeline. A defining moment between the past and the future. An eventuality even more certain than the iPad.
It’s not just Google who has experienced the frustration of developing and debugging websites and applications to be compatible with this legacy web browser. Literally hundreds of thousand[s] of programmers and developers worldwide, have waited patiently for over eight years for someone to pull the plug on this terminally-ill browser.
IE6 may be fondly remembered for it’s prevailing market domination over Netscape in the 1990′s, but will not be forgotten as the primary evidence for Microsoft’s Anti-trust lawsuit with the federal government. And at the turn of this decade, for its fundamental security weaknesses that left a gaping hole for hackers in China’s to access many corporate computers in the US.
A fond fairwell IE6. You will not be forgotten. Nor will you be missed.

~ Via Vincent Thome on Facebook ~

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Yeah, as a Web developer, I remember fondly this browser just coming onto the scene when I first started my undergraduate subject on Web development. The typical “My first Website” compulsory 100% assessment assignment.

I recall the struggles I had to make for compatibility’s sake. This was during the extreme height of the browser wars. Codes were not compatible browser to browser. Standards were not clearly defined. I had to make at least THREE different CSS files.

On top of all that, all the HTML (Website format codes) had to be W3C validated, thus forcing design rot at that time. The validator’s printout was a compulsory part of the assignment, and it was just so thick.

I remember the ugly crashes it used to have, its slow loading times for several Websites, and its (still present in version annoying clicks. The viruses, spyware and malware that came in, its many many patches. The many popups that came up.

Certain people tried to make it better like AvantBrowser (still surviving), but still just couldn’t get around IE 6′s annoyances.

I finally migrated to Firefox and have been staying ever since, only moving back to Internet Explorer when required by Microsoft-based Web development (which I have forgoned now), or by certain “ignoramus” Websites.