It’s kind of become the black sheep of the browser family recently, hasn’t it? Once tabbed as the undisputed leader among web browsers (in 2002, IE6 had a total market share of over 90%), Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 has crumbled lately, drawing an intense amount of criticism for its instability and inability to support alpha transparency in PNG images, among other issues.

IE6 still holds a 20% market share on web browser activity, but it’s likely that that number will drop in the extremely near future. A number of sites and anti-IE6 campaigns have popped up in the past year, though none have made quite the impact that Google’s recent announcement likely will.

In an announcement made yesterday, Google’s Apps team stated that they would no longer support IE6, choosing instead to phase the browser out of commission over the course of 2010.

Rajen Sheth and his Apps team didn’t offer too much of an explanation for the decision; they didn’t need to. All he provided was that there existed a new guard of browsers – “Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above” – that would much better fit your security, JavaScript processing, and HTML5 needs. He goes on:

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.

So the question turns to those 20% of Internet users still using what’s just been deemed an artifact: is it time to phase out IE6? Is this decision from Google all that surprising? And something else to consider: do you think that with the advent and development of Google Chrome that we’ll see Google begin to abandon their support of more and more external browsers?