I’m a big, big fan of Google Apps.  Their decision to allow people to piggyback on their services with their domains was nothing short of brilliant.  Every domain I have set up since has used their service and I have nothing but good things to say about it.

Friday they gave me another reason to love them by sending me an e-mail informing me that:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

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.

For those who need a translation:

We at Google, after careful observation of the Analytics trends for our Google Apps usage, have noticed a single defining characteristic shared by 100% of our problem users.  This characteristic is an affinity for Internet Explorer 6.  Therefore, in an attempt to rid ourselves of as many idiots as possible, we are dropping support for their favorite software.  Stop using Internet Explorer 6 or stop using Google, we don’t care which.

This is a bold move by Google, although completely necessary (and inevitable) if they want to make the best applications the web has to offer.  And honestly, I wish more companies would take this stance.  But on the heels of telling China to shove it I’d say Google may have decided that they are now well established enough in both the political and technical arenas to start throwing some weight around.

I generally don’t like when big companies start using their size to dictate trends, but when I think about it that’s probably because almost always the big company does this to further their agenda.  Rarely does my agenda fall in line with theirs.  From a technology standpoint, Microsoft is the most frequent offender on this front, and we all know that when Microsoft throws its weight around it’s in an effort to make more people see things Microsoft’s way, not in an effort to make the world see things the agreed upon standards way. At least so far, Google seems to be forwarding web standards which are something that for better or worse we as a technical community have agreed upon as good.

I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords…  As long as those overlords hate IE6 as much as I do.