YouTube To Kill IE6 Support On March 13

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.'"

Important Clarification:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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:One has to wonder

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that, with the version of Outlook Web Access that shipped with Exchange 2007, all browsers other than IE6+(including most recent versions of Firefox and Safari) are forced to use "Outlook Web Access Light", while IE has access to "Outlook Web Access Premium", I'm going to assume that MS is willing to risk it.

From a market perspective, they would be morons to lock out any potential customers; but you'd probably have to prove pretty deliberate malfeasance in order to get anything legally actionable, particularly if it involves support for browsers that aren't supported by their own producers anymore...

Google IS dumping older versions of FF

[argent]

RTFA

Google IS dumping older versions of Firefox as well.

Re:w00t!

[TheRaven64]

Something of a non-sequiteur, as the H.264 CODEC is not part of, nor mandated by, the HTML5 spec.

Re:How does H.264 decoder hardware actually work?

[slimjim8094]

No, they're usually a "black box" you throw data at and get back video. See Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Re:Finally

[Hadlock]

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.

Re:How does H.264 decoder hardware actually work?

[forkazoo]

But how does H.264 decoder hardware actually work? Does it involve putting an H.264 stream on one pin and getting decompressed RGB video on another? Or is the codec split between a CPU that parses the bit stream and a DSP that performs things like cosine transform and YUV conversion, operations that should be reusable for other codecs like MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, and Theora?

No simple answer. Some stuff basically takes the full compressed video into the hardware, and then you trust it when it says that video is being output. You may not even have direct CPU access to the frame buffer with the resulting uncompressed frames of video. Other stuff gives uncompressed frames back to the CPU. Other stuff accelerates some of the steps.

AIUI, my n900 has a DSP on the SOC which is used for MPEG4 stuff, but could just as well be used to accelerate other codecs. It also has an OpenGL 2 ES GPU, which has support for pixel shaders. One can imagine a future firmware revision on a device like an n900 with full support for OpenCL on the GPU being able to use that to accelerate fairly arbitrary codecs in "semi-hardware." A more hardcore GPGPU guy than myself could probably accomplish quite a lot just using the pixel shader functionality to dump intermediate steps into a FBO.

Given how common pixel shader capable GPU hardware is becoming in the mobile space, I fully expect that we'll see OpenCL become very common for GPGPU stuff in handheld devices for DSP-like things. It'll take a little while, but eventually the wheel of reinvention will reduce video codecs back to software and it will become a moot point.

Re:w00t!

[TheRaven64]

Like HTML 1-4 then. They don't specify formats for images, for example. PNG, GIF, and JPEG are all outside of the HTML spec.

There is such a thing as scope, when it comes to specs. Some things do not belong in a spec.