Today the SharePoint Team has announced that IE6 will no longer be supported in SharePoint 2010!
A bit about IE6’s bad reputation:
IE6 has always been the most hated piece of software around. It has lots of bugs, security issues, instability issues, doesn’t fully support modern web standards and the list goes on.
There was even some campaigns out there trying to get people not to use IE6 (stopIE6, bringDownIE6).
Despite all of the above IE6 still enjoys a fair market share even today when there are already 2 newer versions of it.
The problem goes deeper in businesses and organizations when IE6 is mandatory, most likely due to legacy web apps that doesn’t play well with modern browsers.
Since SharePoint is at the heart of many organizations, and business needs, I think this announcement has marked the end of IE6.
The announcement address other browsers, and said that are working to increase the level of compatibility with them. This makes sense especially after they hinted about XHTML support, but I don’t think that ActiveX control are to be replaced anytime soon.
Check out the announcement:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx
-- My name is Itay Shakury and I’m a SharePoint Consultant --