January 1, 2009 by Simon King
Google has begun suggesting that users of Gmail, the company’s email service halt their use of internet explorer and move on to either their own browser, Chrome, or Firefox, which they are heavily involved with.
People running Gmail on Internet Explorer 6 receive a message imploring them to ‘get faster Gmail,’ appearing in the menu bar. If they click on it they are transported to a page which boasts that Firefox and Chrome are ‘twice as fast,’ at running the mail service and, by implication, everything else. Until last week there was a similar message displayed to users of Internet Explorer 7, but that has now mysteriously disappeared. No other browsers are mentioned by Google in this way.
It’s no surprise that Google believe their browsers are better than IE, though coming out and directly saying so is cheeky to say the least. The online giant must be pretty confident of its claims to risk angering the armies of Microsoft lawyers who’d just love the chance to suit up and sue the company for slander.
For this reason I’d assume that their claims are well founded. If you do run Google on IE6, it might be an idea to give it a go on Firefox or Chrome. Infuriating though it may be, Google are very rarely wrong.
Related posts:
