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Google Youtube Businesses Microsoft

Ex-YouTube Developer Reveals How He 'Conspired To Kill IE6' (zdnet.com) 91

A former web developer at YouTube has revealed a tale about a clandestine operation to kill Internet Explorer 6 with a banner that went live in July 2009 warning IE6 users that YouTube would be phasing out support for Microsoft's browser -- even though no one at Google had endorsed such a plan. From a report: IE6 of course shipped as the default browser with Windows XP in 2001, six years before Chrome's first release in 2008. Google wouldn't officially drop support for IE6 until March 2010, but a group of renegade web developers at YouTube had already pulled off a campaign that coincided with a serious fall in IE6 usage worldwide, from about 25 percent in mid-2009 to less than 10 percent within a year. The campaign consisted of a web banner displayed to IE6 users on YouTube beginning in July 2009. The banner hadn't been officially endorsed by Google, which had acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65bn and by 2009 had begun integrating it into the Google infrastructure.

As former YouTube web developer Chris Zacharias details in a blog, the desire to kill off IE6 was that it had become "the bane of our web development team's existence". "At least one to two weeks every major sprint cycle had to be dedicated to fixing new UI that was breaking in IE6. Despite this pain, we were told we had to continue supporting IE6 because our users might be unable to upgrade or might be working at companies that were locked in," he explains.

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Ex-YouTube Developer Reveals How He 'Conspired To Kill IE6'

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  • by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Friday May 03, 2019 @04:37PM (#58535548)

    IE6 had lived far beyond the time it should have. It needed to die.

  • by EzInKy ( 115248 ) on Friday May 03, 2019 @04:37PM (#58535550)

    My hats off to him!!

    • by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Friday May 03, 2019 @05:09PM (#58535686)
      Your black hats or your white hats?
    • Remember that Google motto - since dropped - "Don't do Evil". As far as I'm concerned, they picked up a lot of positive karma with this decision.
      The place I worked at back then was totally married to IE6 and its quirks, it actually took Microsoft declaring IE6 to be totally unsafe before they updated their internal web-based processes. At least this message forced them to tolerate other browsers for external usage.

    • Google search does not even return the same results page to Firefox on android as to Chrome. Chrome gets a nice and shine search results with maps and other expanded functionality while the Firefox gets a 1999ish looking page. The funny thing is that this can be changed with a user agent string. And sadly, I am seeing more and more web sites stop working correctly with Firefox. Everyone seems to be targeting chrome.

  • Microsoft plays lots of dirty underhanded shenanigans on customers and business competitors and partners alike, so any bad karma going Microsoft's way is not even news to me
    • You seem to think Microsoft wanted people to use IE 6 in 2009. Of course they didn't. IE 7 had been out for 3 years by then, and people being content to run ancient systems that never updated meant lost money for Microsoft trying to sell Vista / 7 (granted IE 7 was available for XP, but the mindset of an IE 6 user tended to be unprofitable).

      • if i was in a position to mass advertise a product change to billions of users i would suggest they use something completely different, like LInux, start them off with something easy like Mint or ubuntu, once they get their feet wet and get an interest in Linux they will migrate to other distributions that suit their needs and taste, suggesting they move to a newer version of windows just goes against my philosophy
  • by shanen ( 462549 ) on Friday May 03, 2019 @04:54PM (#58535628) Homepage Journal

    I'm shocked, shocked I say to hear that click-baiting is going on in this establishment!

    While I do regard YouTube as a kind of criminal conspiracy of a peculiarly charitable sort, that headline was distinctly misleading. I do think the underlying story points to problems in the standardization of the WWW and competitive problems due to the squabbles among the wannabe monopolists, but the story is still a disappointment.

    So can you imagine going back to a reality based stock market? Me neither.

    (BtW, I still refuse to take Bitcoin seriously. There's an infinite supply of interesting equations... Now if you can prove the Euler-Mascheroni Constant isn't a rational number, then I'd be impressed. (Seems obvious it must be transcendental or worse.))

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday May 03, 2019 @05:09PM (#58535688)

    I'm a bit worried with most major browser support coalescing around Chrome, that at some point we'll reach the level where it is holding us all back as well...

    Still a long ways off, if ever, but just something to contemplate as we all reflect on how OK we all are with this underhanded but effective means of getting users to ditch IE6.

    And just to be clear - I am TOTALLY OK with what they did, because of the target. That's probably really bad but at least I am honest here.

    • I'm a bit worried with most major browser support coalescing around Chrome, that at some point we'll reach the level where it is holding us all back as well... Still a long ways off, if ever,

      Google's AMP ideas are really bad. We don't want to give complete power of the web to Google, they treat it like beta. They don't know how to make stable software.

    • Already happened long ago, and people have been trying to wake others up:
      https://www.theverge.com/2018/... [theverge.com]

      Unfortunately, for some reason 90% of the technically adept are for some reason giving Google a pass for all the shit that Microsoft for raked over the coals for doing the same thing. I can't tell you how many I know who would agree the IE thing was (and often, still is) a nightmare yet are staunchly loyal Chrome fans.

      Fucking hypocrites are going to ruin the web all over again.

    • I'm a bit worried with most major browser support coalescing around Chrome, that at some point we'll reach the level where it is holding us all back as well...

      Still a long ways off, if ever...

      Two thoughts here...with the bonus one of the fact that I can't believe that I'm about to play devil's advocate for Google here - I'm far from a fan of theirs.

      The first thought is that Google is targeting Chrome, and will basically forever target Chrome, which means that Gmail, Youtube, the Google homepage, Analytics, Groups, and all their other user-facing properties will work with it. While Chrome is a means to an end to get people to use Google services as easily as possible, IE6 was, to a decent extent,

    • Expected behavior not working. GUI works in Mozilla and IE (haha!) but sometimes glitch in chrome.
    • In the days of IE6, almost all the "standards compliance" issues were things like a banner ad had a margin a few pixels off, or a font overlapped its containing box by one em. It was ugly, but the site still worked perfectly fine. Today, there's so much scripting at play that if you're not using the absolute latest version of Chrome, all you'll get is a stark white page and no content shows up AT ALL.

      UX people are such temperamental twits. They don't care if content is accessible or is remotely usable, b

  • I just heard that YouTube would be phasing out support for Microsoft Windows.

    Also I heard, that Microsoft is working on a POSIX kernel to replace the legacy Windows (NT) kernel, and they will be phasing out the the legacy Windows (NT) kernel in 2020-2023.

    I know most of you will welcome this to finally deprecate of Dos prompts, "C:\", ".bat" files, and "\r\n".
    For those of you that must have these things, may I suggest freedos or reactos as a continuation.

  • It was Professor Plum, in the Utility Closet, with the Sniper Rifle!

  • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Friday May 03, 2019 @05:50PM (#58535840)

    How about NOT changing your web site every two weeks. Is that too hard a concept to grasp?

    Every time I visit to look at something the site keeps changing. Even worse, there are more and more annoying popups asking me to sign up, do this, look at this. To use a phrase:

    Stop trying to make me sign up. It's not going to happen.

  • by farble1670 ( 803356 ) on Friday May 03, 2019 @06:24PM (#58535972)

    "At least one to two weeks every major sprint cycle had to be dedicated to fixing new UI that was breaking in IE6. Despite this pain, we were told we had to continue supporting IE6 because our users might be unable to upgrade or might be working at companies that were locked in," he explains.

    Welcome to software development, friend. Where sometimes you have to be backwards compatible, and sometimes provide support for what users, not your own development preferences.

  • This is showing how much power google has over the internet. Do we want this? What if they decide to kill $your_browser the next day?

    • by Wolfrider ( 856 )

      --Normally I'd be with you 99%, but IE6 NEEDED to die. Companies *cannot afford* browser lock-in for the better part of a decade. It opens up a lot of attack vectors, for one thing.

      --Apps NEED to be built to open standards - and maintained/updated - or you get shite like a NAS configuration app requiring a specific (buggy,insecure) version of Java from 5 years ago, that only ran on XP. Then you need to dedicate an entire VM just to run that version. We're all better off that they helped kill it!

      • The domination of chromium in the marketplace seems so vast, my first thought when opening Firefox last night was that the company had been successfully hacked as an attack on the company itself. In any case, as the heir to Netscape Navigator, there is a certain je ne sais quoi about possibly seeing Firefox follow in its footsteps. And of course, Google is getting even more powerful.

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