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YouTube To Kill IE6 Support On March 13 282

Posted by CmdrTaco from the if-you-strike-me-down dept.
Joel writes "Over six months ago, Google announced it would start phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 on Orkut and YouTube, and started pushing its users to modern browsers. The search giant has now given a specific kill date for old browser support on the video website: 'Support stops on March 13th. Stopped support essentially means that some future features on YouTube will be rolled out that won't work in older browsers.'"
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YouTube To Kill IE6 Support On March 13 More

YouTube To Kill IE6 Support On March 13

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  • Finally (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dyinobal ( 1427207 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @10:13AM (#31259456)
    And everyone lets out a collective exhale "Finally".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

      FINALLY

    • __try_finally

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsa ( 15680 )

      FINALLY!

    • Re:Finally (Score:4, Informative)

      by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @11:32AM (#31260572) Homepage Journal

      Finally, but in replacement, Youtube is likely upgrading to their new "beta" interface they've been testing for quite some time, which has (IMO) really poor functionality, and looks like the Hulu.com's interface designer's scrappy younger brother designed (which is totally unusable, btw). No wonder they're dropping IE6 support; the new interface is such shit IE6 probably can't handle it.

    • I think I'll cut IE6 support from all my websites on March 13 too. People that haven't upgraded will no longer be pampered but will simply see a screen telling them they need to upgrade. We waste a huge amount of time trying to keep everything working on IE6, IE7, and IE8. More than we spend on Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome combined.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by commodore64_love ( 1445365 )

        >>>will simply see a screen telling them they need to upgrade.

        Why do that? Why not just simply treat IE6 users the same way you treat IE5 or IE4 users (give them the webpage, but it may not render properly).

        Maybe they have a good reason for not upgrading (like owning a PowerMac or other old computer that won't anything but IE5 or IE6).

  • w00t! (Score:2, Funny)

    by somersault ( 912633 )

    With Youtube comes great power :)

  • As a designer who has been leaping through hoops the past couple weeks getting a website IE6 compliant because the client insists on still using the browser, I say GOOD RIDDANCE!! The sooner we can drive IE6 from the corporate landscape and force people to upgrade to a browser that isn't a decade old and out of date, all the better.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sakdoctor ( 1087155 )

      The problem is merely one of semantics.

      IE6 == web browser // Major problem
      IE6 != web browser AND IE6 == Corporate network app viewer // No problem

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by rvw ( 755107 )

        IE6 == web browser // Major problem
        IE6 != web browser AND IE6 == Corporate network app viewer // No problem

        Just use Firefox or Chrome + IETab. I don't get it why those big corporations don't understand this.

    • Good riddance? Sounds like you assume this means more than it does. Google won't stop IE6 users on YouTube. It's about future features that may not work.

  • Next up, IE7 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sakdoctor ( 1087155 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @10:21AM (#31259596) Homepage

    IE7 is almost as much of an albatross as IE6 was.
    CSS support is such, that if you want pixel perfect layout, you are looking at a seperate style sheet; and if you just serve the standards compliant sheet, your page will look like ass.

    Update all "ie6 must die" campaigns, to "ie7 must die".

    • The benefit of IE7 is that at least the upgrade path is simpler, since it can be pushed through the windows update process, so when MS finally gets on board with CSS3/HTML5 (hopefully IE9, but we've been burned before), maybe it'll decide to flick the switch and bring everyone up to date.

      • Don't get your hopes up for IE9.

        All IE versions including IE8 have a subtle knife to hold back web progress. IE doesn't style unknown elements without the hideous HTML5 shiv hack [ejohn.org].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rvw ( 755107 )

      IE7 is almost as much of an albatross as IE6 was.

      The benefit of IE7 is that it doesn't support IE6 apps, and there are no IE7-specific apps like with IE6. So upgrading to IE8 or IE9 etc won't be such a problem.

    • Exactly my thought. Just that I include every IE ever with the Trident engine.

      I will only let MS off the hook, if they do a complete rewrite of that mess.

      The reason? Because Trident is a MS-typical upside-down pyramid. You know, like Windows ME. Or MS Office.
      It desperately needs a redesign of the core architecture.

      But I’m fair. If MS really does that, they will get my respect. As that new engine would most likely blow even Firefox out of the water. (Gecko still is way too close to Netscape Navigator 4

    • IE8 sucks too. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MikeFM ( 12491 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @11:50AM (#31260882) Homepage Journal
      For that matter IE8 sucks too. I wish Microsoft would just get it together and use webkit or gecko as their rendering engine. They could keep the familiar IE interface and whatever extras they wanted without forcing this load of crap on all us poor developers that just want standards support.

    • Re:Next up, IE7 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BenoitRen ( 998927 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @01:01PM (#31261964)

      pixel perfect layout

      If you want to be standards compliant, you'll throw away the outdated notion of a pixel-perfect lay-out. It's all about flexible lay-outs.

      • Re:Next up, IE7 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by KlomDark ( 6370 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @01:25PM (#31262352) Homepage Journal

        Amen brother! Now if we could just get rid of all the sucky "web designers" with their pre-historic web concepts.

        "Here's a cool picture of a web page I made with Dreamweaver, now you have to make it work for real, and don't take to long and it has to look exactly like my picture." - I got so sick of that crap. Little newb idiots that don't get the concept of liquid layout and insist on "pixel perfect".

  • IE 6 will still be alive (and unfortunately not so well) in the corporate workplace all over the nation. In fact many companies are also breathing a sigh of relief along with us techies, but for different reasons. They don't want their users watching videos while they should be working. They are very likely happy that YouTube won't be supporting a browser that many of their critical one off, undersupported, buggy, POS (both versions of the acronym apply) IE 6 only apps do.

    • They don't want their users watching videos while they should be working.

      Yet some companies still keep IE 6 on the PC in the break room.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yvanhoe ( 564877 )
      Then they should mandate Lynx

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      Not really. I've recently worked for/with a couple of large companies (100,000+ employees) that still included IE6 on XP SP 3 to support some legacy apps. They *ALSO* included Firefox -- or a link to download it internally -- for everything else.

      I've seen very few places in the last couple of years that mandated IE6 and IE6 ONLY.

    • Seriously, what workplace do you work in, that hasn’t done any Windows Updates for a couple of years, putting the company as a whole at huge risks?

      Even without talking about Firefox... WTF?
      I mean all I would need to wreck your whole company to bankrupcy, would be someone from your company surfing on my prepared site...
      The holes are well-known. And IE6 won’t be fixed anymore.
      That’s all it would take for you to lose your job!!

      Now of course I wouldn’d do that to you, as I’m not a

  • Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by headkase ( 533448 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @10:22AM (#31259610)
    The thing about supporting obsolete technology forever is that the people who want the support will always want the support forever. Sometimes, you just have to cut them loose because that is the only way to get them to move to something better. And once they are on something better they'll wonder how they got along without it - with the cycle repeating. Of course some of their outdated applications will need to be updated but really does it always have to get to the point where you insist you need "Windows 95" forever?

    • Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Funny)

      by BenoitRen ( 998927 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @01:05PM (#31262026)

      Of course some of their outdated applications will need to be updated but really does it always have to get to the point where you insist you need "Windows 95" forever?

      Yes. It's still very usable, and upgrading your computer to something that'll run slower and not make you more productive is dumb.

  • Important Clarification: (Score:5, Informative)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @10:25AM (#31259642) Journal
    It should be noted that Google is not breaking youtube for IE6 users(the poor bastards). Doing so would be pretty stupid, especially since most of the heavy lifting goes on inside the flash blob, and people slacking at work are probably a decent sized audience.

    They are just declaring their intention to no longer subject new features to the "can it be made to work with IE6?" test.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by mandelbr0t ( 1015855 )

      They are just declaring their intention to no longer subject new features to the "omfg how the f*** can I get this to work in this fscking old Microshit browser???!!" gauntlet of pain.

      There, fixed that for you :-)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by value_added ( 719364 )

      It should be noted that Google is not breaking youtube for IE6 users(the poor bastards). Doing so would be pretty stupid ...

      Correct on both counts. From the fine article:

      YouTube will have an interstitial appear when users on older browser try to watch a video on YouTube. Google says the interstitial will show up indefinitely every two weeks until the user upgrades to the most recent version of their browser.

      Implicit in the approach is an attempt to shame the user. That, combined with the presentation of a

      • It's not so much that IE6 sucks as that it's outdated. At release, IE6 was a perfectly reasonable choice of browser. It might not have been a *good* browser, but there wasn't much choice, and in particular there were no exceptional alternatives, especially for free, so it was a reasonable one.

        The problem is the aforementioned release is nearly a decade ago. If anybody were still using the Gecko/Mozilla codebase from back then (I don't think it was even open sourced yet, though I might be wrong there) you ca

    • Doing so would be pretty stupid.

      Sorry, but that is very stupid. (Especially since you brought no base argument why.)

      People like you always assume doing that would cause raging torch-carrying mobs on the streets, because people are completely unable/unwilling to change anything in their life. (Which is already flawed logic, since becoming a raging mob is already a change.)

      Repeat this with me: The only reason people are unwilling to change things, is because you trained them to expect it in the first place!

      You know what would happen in real

  • I wonder what consequences will website-imposed browsers have. Perhaps we're heading towards some kind of content - terminal matching OS, where all content will come with terminal specs, and you basically install a dozen terminal emulators on your systems. Kind of like thinstation [thinstation.org]. x86 is pretty much becoming a kind of terminal, with hypervisors. And win32 or Linux a kind of content-packager-gui or something.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Spad ( 470073 )

      Not really. They're not imposing anything; IE6 will still "work" with Youtube for basic functionality. Google are simply saying that they will no longer actively support IE6 and therefore cannot be sure that any future additions to the site will work correctly, or at all with it.

      IE6 over 9 years old and it wasn't exactly top of the technology & standards tree when it was released. The only reason it's been supported this long is because XP refuses to die and people have only really started to adopt IE8

    • Websites have been "imposing" browser limitations for years, largely because browser interoperability was a huge issue just a few years ago.

      Granted, IE6 was a significant contributor to that mess, since IE6 was Microsoft's "extinguish" phase of their attempt to "embrace, extend, extinguish" the Web a decade ago. They provided inexpensive and well-designed web development tools that put out code that only their own web browser could read, then upgraded both the tools and the browser once they realized the wh

  • This is one reason for businesses to keep IE6 - no more time wasting employees watching YouTube!! Hooray!!

    • YouTube is increasingly becoming an important tool, especially in marketing and training. For example, search for "PMP Certification", "ITIL", "iso 9000" on YouTube. Not to mention any number of technical skill areas.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by delinear ( 991444 )
        Not to mention that it's trivial for businesses who don't want their users watching videos to simply block the site at the firewall. Why throw out all the additional benefits of a newer, standards compliant browser just to save your admins typing one line in a config file? Not to mention if Youtube ever did make the site completely unusable to IE6 users by implementing a UI they can't access, it would be a couple of hours before a bunch of opportunists threw up sites offering Youtube content with IE6 suppor

        • Not to mention that it's trivial for businesses who don't want their users watching videos to simply block the site at the firewall.

          Trivial, but more obviously their choice. If YouTube stops working for their people by circumstance beyond their control (it no longer working on the company's chosen standard browser) they'll get less complaints (or at least less complaints that they can't just say "not our fault guv" to) than if it stops working because they explicitly block it.

          It could actually work in favor of people getting upgrades. If the PHBs start being inconvenienced maybe they'll demand the upgrade option gets taken seriously. Ac

  • Now we'll never get rid of it in corporate IT...

    PHB: I hear IE6 can no longer be used for viewing Youtube. IE6 is now mandatory for all employees.

  • It is great that they are doing this, but I really do not see this convincing all that many people to upgrade.
    Most of the people using IE6 are corporations, and not allowing their workers/students to watch youtube would most likely be a feature for them anyways.
  • So apparently IE7 is considered a "modern browser"???

    • It implements something vaguely resembling the specs, which is a damn sight better than 6 does.

      Ideally, IE6, 7, and all sites designed for them should be cast into a fiery pit and wrought anew respecting proper standards.

      But since that is not possible, we shall have to compromise and I will take some improvement over none at all.

    • Depends on if the person you are asking knows anything about browsers.

      IE7 and 8, and in fact every software with the Trident engine, is not considered a browser at all by professional web developers. ;)

      The Trident “engine” ” or rather “upside-down pyramid architecture” — in the deciding factor.

  • STW (Score:2)

    by tsa ( 15680 )

    I worked as a researcher at the University of Twente for a project that was funded by STW [www.stw.nl], the Dutch funding agency for applied physics reseach. In 2007 STW forced us to use their new online database which turned out to be powered by MS crapware. It was completely unusable when you tried to approach it with Firefox, and even with IE6 it generated massive amounts of the most horrible error messages when you uploaded a file. After two hours on the phone with one of their 'supporters' who kept telling us to us

  • The various coverage of the absurd longevity of IE6 recently has made me feel pretty good about my decision to move my career away from things Web-related. The pain of trying to make a modern website work with a 9 year old & buggy-as-shit browser is something I never wish to go through. IE6 is something I would maybe fire up for a bit of ironic nostalgia, typing in various URLs, giggling at how badly it renders and remembering that this is what the internet used to be like, before remembering that peopl

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Spad ( 470073 )

      Here's an idea for Mozilla and Google. Make your browsers configurable by Active Directory Group Policy Objects so that they can be locked down in "enterprise" environments like IE can be. This is surely the biggest barrier to corporate uptake of Firefox, Chrome, etc?

      I've said it repeatedly, but I usually get shouted down as a luser windoze admin who is apparently incapable of managing my domain(s) correctly. Firefox doesn't even store or read any (user-level) settings from the registry, so I can't just roll my own ADMX templates either.

      Clearly what I should be doing is scripting scheduled tasks to run on every machine on the network on a regular basis that edit the prefs.js file in each users' Firefox profile and configures proxy & security settings there - couldn'

  • 'Nuff said.

  • Ides of March being the following Monday could be a busy day for some sysadmins, "hey my youtubes don't work" :-)

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