Who creates the rules on the internet? Microsoft? Mozilla? Google? The answer is W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, an organization with 333 members with a mission to create the standards of the internet as we know it today. Members include the usual household names of the internet, Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft.

For our latest website, we’re obviously going to adhere to the latest in W3C standards. By following these guidelines, you are almost assured to have websites that look, and function uniformly across all browsers.

Except for Microsoft Browsers. Which just happen to be the dominant browser out there.

Of the browser from Microsoft, IE6 is notoriously difficult to deal with. PNG transparency, not there. There are often times when you think you have made the perfect design, only to find that the page looks completely different in IE6. To make matters worse, when you finally fix things for IE6, sometimes IE7 or IE8 would break, for no apparent reason.

That’s why Google has announced that it will stop supporting IE6 at the end of this month for their feature rich web applications, such as Google Documents. I do believe that with this change, the products from Google will come faster and run more stable than now.

What does this mean for us? Firstrade encounters the same issues as Google when we are design webpages, so we’re definitely hoping Google’s actions will lead IE6 users to upgrade to newer browsers. In the meantime, rest assured that our site will continue to support IE6 and all the other popular browsers out there.