Today the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission has granted “Google Energy” the official right energy, capacity, and services at market prices just like a utility. Google Energy is a new subsidiary of the search giant Google.

Now Google is saying that they want this to happen in their eternal quest to become carbon neutral. Yes, this makes sense. A recent study found (and Google confirmed it on their blog) that each Google search that you make uses about 7 grams of CO2 or about the same amount of energy as boiling a cup of water. Now that may sound minimal, but when we notice that 91,000,000 Google searches are preformed on average per day, it starts to raise some serious eyebrows. Google uses A LOT of energy!

That’s right, google is no longer supporting Internet Explorer 6 in its’ products and services. Most importantly this refers to services like Google Docs and Google Sites, but the support will continue to wain. This announcement, made on their blog, is nothing to be too shocked about, but it is still big news. Many companies have been discontinuing support for IE6 recently, especially since the product is a free download, there is really no reason that users aren’t upgrading.

With Google, this is a big deal because…. well, it’s Google. The largest internet company is finally saying

“Goodbye IE6! We think it would be best if we stayed friends and remember our good times together, but we can’t support you anymore, it is time that we both move on.”

Now that Google has finally embraced the truth, many more will follow suite. Once the big dawg gives the OK to let it go, no one else has a reason to keep it up, and soon, IE6 will be dead.

This is a nice early retirement for IE6 since recently Microsoft claimed that they would support IE6 until 2014. The reasoning behind it is that 20% of users still only use this browser. It looks like the developer community has put a harsh foot forward and decided to halt support for this outdated browser.