Last week, Google announced that they will stop the supporting Internet Explorer 6 in Google Apps. Now according to a Ars Technica report, Google is also ending support of the Internet Explorer 6 in GMail and Google Calendar as well later in 2010. Google did not reveal this last bit of news in the emails they sent to Google Apps admins last week.

Here is what Google said:

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar. Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Google has confirmed that the IE6 support in GMail and Google Calendar will be withdrawn for both the Google Apps users and general users.

According to recent estimates, around 20% of the internet users still use IE6. Although there is no statistics as to how many of these IE6 users also use GMail and Google Calendar, it is bound to be quite a high percentage due to the popularity of GMail. As a result it is expected that a lot of users will be hit and be forced to upgrade their browser.

[via Ars Technica]