Yes. I love the story, and if I had been in charge I don&#x27;t see how I could do anything but fire the whole lot of them.Although... the number of people involved in the &quot;OldTubers&quot; backdoor seems to have been pretty substantial, I don&#x27;t know if they could really have fired all of them...But who is anyone to say if doing anything is &quot;right&quot;? We&#x27;re all equally qualified to have a moral compass.

This is exactly the sort of riskless sentiment that causes something like IE6 to persist forever.&gt; I mean, who are we to say that this was doing it right? It turned out to be beneficial but there are thousands of ways that this could explode in your face if you tried it yourself.How would this explode in your face, exactly? What was the risk here?

They weren&#x27;t working at a medical or financial company so your argument is pointless.

This is not comparable imho.No medical or financial company has this vibrant engineering IT culture like the web startups 20 years ago had.Everything was new and exciting, and things moved foreward exactly due to the flexibility of all involved, the uncertainty, the flat hierarchies, and the fact that many rules either didn&#x27;t exist, or only existed on paper.This is what happens everytime a new market emerges, where structures need some time to settle.Once they have settled down, procedures become standardized, but they also become so boring that all innovation is lost.What happend at Youtube 12 years ago is exactly what happens right now at some Cryptocurrency start ups. The start ups that are succesful are exactly those start ups where people like this Youtube engineer do not get fired. If YT had such an authoritarian attitude in 2009, they would never have become succesful.It&#x27;s easy for the blog author to say &quot;I have no idea why we weren&#x27;t fired&quot; but I bet back then it was all fun and games. (Getting fired isn&#x27;t even that bad, what really harms people is when everyone around them starts to tell them things like &quot;You could have ruined everything!&quot;)And something similar to the excitement and fluidity within the Youtube of 12 years ago happened 80 years ago in pharmaceutical companies, or 200 years ago within a Bank, when such structures were still freshly formed.

This is correct, but there&#x27;s a complication: YouTube today is a lot more than the YouYube of 2006. Today, people&#x27;s livelihoods depend on YouTube. Naturally, I&#x27;d expect more responsible engineers.

If enough developers want to do something, you can&#x27;t stop them. You can make it take more developers, that is the best you can do.

&gt; Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive &#x27;old timer&#x27; permissions that basically backdoored the company&#x27;s engineering processesHave you heard about Kerviel? A trader that cost his banks a few billions of euros? He was able to do this because he could bypass reviews by his boss and the internal compliance team.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel</a>Edit: to be fair, it look like he took the blame for all the failings of the company

This seems like a kind of silly objection. It&#x27;s kind of like - I have some knives in my kitchen for cutting food, as does most of the world&#x27;s population. I, or anyone else, could pick one up and go out and stab somebody. 99% of the world is capable of not doing that.Can&#x27;t we presume that all of this setup happened because everyone involved knew perfectly well that it was just a moderately popular video hosting site? And that they would all have behaved differently if they knew that peoples&#x27; life savings and medical histories were at risk? Did it go out of style somehow to presume that people were mostly sane most of the time?

It&#x27;s a fascinating tech story, but it would easily turn into a horror if we weren&#x27;t talking about something like a video hosting platform.Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive &#x27;old timer&#x27; permissions that basically backdoored the company&#x27;s engineering processes. Even if the engineers saw a good reason to do so.I mean, who are we to say that this was doing it right? It turned out to be beneficial but there are thousands of ways that this could explode in your face if you tried it yourself.

I can think of a third reason: everybody in the industry wanted IE6 dead. It was expensive to maintain support for an old, broken browser and often meant new features couldn&#x27;t be added. The people who should have fired the conspirators were glad that the conspiracy succeeded even if they had objections to the methods used.

3. They need developers. Everyone was hiring like mad in those days, still are. They don&#x27;t want to lose a big pile of good developers.

&gt; I don&#x27;t know how they didn&#x27;t all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special &quot;OldTuber&quot; priv long before.I can think of 2 reasons:1. The gamble paid off. It turned out the time was ripe. Thus, there was really no negative impact on the organization that people had to be punished for.2. The OldTubers were the experienced backbone of the group. Firing everyone with that privilege would likely have destroyed the group&#x27;s technical expertise. YouTube as it was would have died.That latter point is a bit of a strong negotiation position that many engineers don&#x27;t realize they have. For example in my team we&#x27;re having a lot of difficulty filling job openings (we&#x27;re picky and frankly our interviewing pipeline sucks). As such, there&#x27;s a significant cost&#x2F;benefit calculation to firing someone. Maybe the person did something egregious, but is it likely to happen again? I know some people in my team are... not great, but are they so bad that we would be better off without them? (I must reluctantly admit, no)

Your comment is demonstrably nonsense. Windows 10 only suggests Edge if you make IE11 your default browser.If you choose Firefox or Chrome it never suggests that you should switch to Edge.Microsoft’s lawyers are not stupid.

Microsoft&#x27;s antitrust settlement with the US only ended in 2011: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;long-antitrust-saga-ends-for-microsoft&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;long-antitru...</a>More importantly, the EU&#x27;s decision on bundling IE with Windows came down in 2007: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission</a>The EU has continued pursuing antitrust cases, and the FTC has now set up a task force to investigate antitrust in tech. The main problem is that the wheels of the legal system turn very slowly, much slower than the startups rise (and fall).

In the timeframe the events this article take place on, the EU was insisting on a &quot;browser choice&quot; screen to be included in Windows 7. MS also got criticism for the random shuffle they used to determine the order of browser icons.

Something that stuck out to me was how concerned Google was that even while recommending other browsers next to Chrome, that putting Chrome first in the list could rankle antitrust regulators.  Fast forward to 2019 and Windows 10 makes you fight multiple menus and &quot;suggestions&quot; just to switch your default browser away from Edge.

I can guarantee you if this happened in the organisation I work in, they would have been fired. It&#x27;s a different kind of organisation, in a different kind of business though.

&gt;&gt;&gt; I don&#x27;t know how they didn&#x27;t all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special &quot;OldTuber&quot; priv long before.That&#x27;s really blowing it out of proportions. It&#x27;s a minor button addition to the UI and they paid attention to not be sued by the European commission for it for anti competitive behavior. It&#x27;s a job well done with nothing to criticize.It&#x27;s a BAU example of how works get done in a large bureaucratic organization.

This part is why it worked:&quot;He had come in on an otherwise normal day to find email from every major tech news publication asking why the second largest website on the planet was threatening to cut off access to nearly a fifth of its user base. Fortunately for us, the publications had already settled on a narrative that this was a major benefit to the Internet. By their call, YouTube was leading the charge towards making the web a faster, safer experience for all of its users.&quot;Go with the Zeitgeist, and you&#x27;ll have a lot of wind in your sails.

Yes, but&gt;They will generally work with the product ownersis exactly what the engineers didn&#x27;t do in this story. The company was completely blindsided.

&gt; I don&#x27;t know how they didn&#x27;t all get fired.That seems extreme.I&#x27;ve worked in some organizations where the assumption is that engineers aren&#x27;t capable of making product decisions. They are merely walking, talking machines that are there to implement the vision of the PM and designers.In other orgs engineers are very much in tune with how product decisions are made, what the business is optimizing for, and what constraints they need to be aware of. They will generally work with the product owners to shape the user experience.I&#x27;m guessing that YouTube was much more in the latter category.

What&#x27;s funny is we actually used YouTube as our &quot;gauge&quot; on what browsers to support. We also built the narrative that: &quot;If YouTube doesn&#x27;t work on this browser, then we will not support it&quot;

I don&#x27;t know how they didn&#x27;t all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special &quot;OldTuber&quot; priv long before.Because this is how everything on the web used to be done. Google won the internet partly because they moved away from this first and best, but product decision making by engineering and overriding approval processes in the name of a good outcome were pretty much standard back then.

It&#x27;s just like Murder on the Orient Express!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(2017_film)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(...</a>&gt;The next morning, Poirot discovers Ratchett was murdered during the night, having been stabbed a dozen times. [...]&gt;With the train back on track, Poirot concludes that justice is impossible in this case, as Cassetti deserved death; for the first time, Poirot will have to live with a lie and imbalance.

Perhaps there was no PM because there was no official Project?

They got visits from PR and Legal but there&#x27;s no mention of a Project Manager - the sort of person I could imagine being the most pissed. Do PMs at YT not rule over their engineers with an iron fist?

This is a classic &quot;better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission&quot; story. They didn&#x27;t get fired because it turned out not to be a huge negative PR hit. Honestly they were just lucky in that regard, if the press had been negative about the banner they likely would have been disciplined.

Oh my, this is amazing.I&#x27;m not sure the engineers realized despite their secrecy, it would be noticed by the press immediately after deploy.But the best part is how Google engineers immediately on seeing it figured &quot;oh yeah, we should do that too&quot; (although they apparently got the necessary approvals however that was done at Google, it was easier to do because they figured &quot;well, youtube must have done due dillegence before doing it.&quot;)Amazing!I don&#x27;t know how they didn&#x27;t all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special &quot;OldTuber&quot; priv long before.But... it worked! This is a hacker story for the history books, it sounds like the kind of thing programmers did 20+ years ago for nothing except the reward of doing it right (against their own career interests), that I feel like doesn&#x27;t happen so much in a more professionalized industry.

You did God&#x27;s work, son. As a bitter veteran of the browser wars, thank you.

They risked their jobs for the greater good. Absolute heroes.

This was a really great read. Thanks for sharing and thanks for putting the nail in the IE6 coffin.

I loved the part when the Docs team added their own because they were &quot;presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals....Amazingly, we had somehow bypassed detection as the originators of the IE6 banner inside of Google.&quot;

This is an awesome article. Thanks to this team they probably helped push the web ahead by a few years ahead vs if web developers still had to support the cripple that is IE6.

I remember using those banners are reasons to not support IE6 in our client projects at the time. It took a bit longer for it to actually fade away for us, but it&#x27;s great to hear the story behind those banners.

The most interesting thing to me is not that Google lead the charge here, but that everyone - including others at Google - was afraid to do it.Web developers the world over hated dealing with IE6 lack of compliance with established standards. Microsoft even had a newer versions of IE that was better. Everyone wanted this, it&#x27;s just that nobody was willing to do anything about it.This is the world we live in. Even with a near worldwide consensus on what needs to be done, nobody is willing to say it for fear of repercussions. People would rather jump through hoops to support the status quo than risk backlash.Another problem is that the people who would normally have to approve a change like this are not the people who had to jump through the hoops to support IE6.

Yeah the part about giving the whole web &quot;permission&quot; to deprecate IE6 should ring alarm bells, even though it&#x27;s not literal.

If YouTube developers are pushing changes that break IE6 layout for the &quot;hundredth time&quot; or crash the browser or OS, it sounds like they didn&#x27;t have adequate QA or didn&#x27;t test IE6, even though it was used by 18% of their users. &quot;Nobody joining the team could be expected to know that early versions of IE&quot; had some quirk could be caught by code reviews and QA.

I really doubt the oopses were intentional.It doesn&#x27;t matter if they were intentional. The author mentioned there may hav been hundreds of these &quot;oops&quot; events. Assuming it wasn&#x27;t intentional, Google knew there was a problem and chose not to fix it.&quot;Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.&quot;Or in Google&#x27;s case, &quot;fool Mozilla a hundred times...&quot;

&gt; The same thing happens in golangCan you elaborate? I kind of agree on the Kubernetes part in that it&#x27;s really biased towards Google-scale, but I fail to see such biases in Go, despite having used it as my primary language for 4 years now.

Intentionally testing one one browser when you know you&#x27;ve run into issues on other browsers is absolutely malicious.

Interesting thread... but I really doubt the oopses were intentional. Instead it&#x27;s just a case of nih syndrome, where the engineers have a myopic view and only test&#x2F;build for the internal Google infra and apps. The same thing happens in golang and Kubernetes.

I&#x27;m not sure what the term for the tech world is, but something similar seems to exist in many areas of many fields.It&#x27;s one of the reasons I stopped accepting lawyers and law firms as clients. Every other client would pay on time. Those in the law field would consistently slow-pay, I believe because they knew they wouldn&#x27;t get sued over it.&quot;That overdue invoice? Oh, we never received it. Send it again.&quot; &quot;Oh, Jenna in accounting must have it, but she&#x27;s on vacation for two weeks.&quot; &quot;Oh, that&#x27;s in process.&quot; &quot;Oh, we still haven&#x27;t received it.&quot; &quot;Oh, you have a signature on a certified mail delivery? It must be upstairs for approval.&quot; &quot;Oh, we&#x27;ve already run all the checks for the month, it&#x27;ll be in next month&#x27;s batch.&quot;I eventually went to a pre-paid hours, payable by credit card-only model. It was the only way to stay afloat. Plus it was delicious when someone would use up all their hours and give give some excuse.&quot;Oh, we really need this on the site today.&quot; &quot;No problem. I can do that as soon as you buy more hours.&quot;&quot;Oh, we&#x27;ll get that paid next week.&quot; &quot;No problem, your website went offline an hour ago and will be back when you buy more hours next week.&quot; Poof! payment comes through three minutes later.

Sadly, no amount of testing can help protect against unexpected changes in browser versions that don&#x27;t exist yet.The best you can do is test the nightly or beta track all the time (if they have one). But that may have false positives due to bugs on their end. And once you notice the bug, you still have to fix it. This isn&#x27;t something to drop everything for like a security bug, so it may have to wait on other things.Meanwhile, people outside the company will assume it&#x27;s intentional sabotage, because that&#x27;s how the Internet thinks these days.

I&#x27;ll take &quot;oopsie.&quot;Google did an &quot;oopsie&quot; and blocked Firefox users from using GmailSounds great.

I call it &quot;Hanlon&#x27;s razor&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanlon%27s_razor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanlon%27s_razor</a>

Is there a good catchy name for this &quot;oops&quot; stuff? It&#x27;s very interesting, an interesting modern take on &quot;embrace and extend&quot; or &quot;FUD&quot;.

I don&#x27;t follow Firefox news.  Can you supply some examples?

I find it ironic that Mozilla complains about this, when they do exactly the same wrt platforms supported by Firefox.

&quot;Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn&#x27;t baked into all of the acceptance tests&quot; seems like a completely expected result.Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn&#x27;t out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?

Who would expect the browser user-agent to actually call itself &quot;EDG&quot; and not &quot;EDGE&quot; though? If you edit the user-agent to include &quot;EDGE&quot; in place of &quot;EDG&quot; everything works, someone thought &quot;EDG&quot; was surely a typo. Malice and stupidity and all that.Now why they&#x27;re still sniffing user agents instead of doing feature detection is a good question for Google, who themselves, to the best of my knowledge, push for feature detection instead of sniffing user agents as best practice. Do as we say - not as we do?

Google has coincidentally made their products not work on Microsoft&#x27;s Chromium based browser...and it&#x27;s not even out of beta.

In this case, the rest of the web put up the banners not because Google controlled the web, but because &quot;if even Google, who has a huge monetary incentive to have their services be accessible to every web surfer [and puts a lot of work into achieving that], is willing to alienate IE6 users, IE6 must really be on the decline.&quot;It&#x27;s sort of the reverse of &quot;nobody ever got fired for buying IBM&quot;: nobody ever got fired for refusing to implement an accessibility measure that not even IBM (or Google, in this case) bothers to implement. Unless you&#x27;re in a very specific sector (in which case you know what your obligations are), your legal duties will always be a strict subset of those of $BIGCORP; so you can use $BIGCORP&#x27;s shirking of a particular duty as a heuristic to determine whether you can safely shirk that same duty.

Influence can be used for good (Killing IE6) and evil (Killing Firefox).

Is this a charming story about helping users upgrade to modern web browsers or a dark parable about the influence of tech giants?Compare with ex-Firefox VP Johnathan Nightingale&#x27;s recent thread about Google &quot;amateur hour&quot; and &quot;oopses&quot; that only affected Firefox:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;johnath&#x2F;status&#x2F;1116871231792455686" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;johnath&#x2F;status&#x2F;1116871231792455686</a>

Unfortunately &#x27;resource intensive&#x27; != &#x27;slower&#x27;.There are many tricks played by modern browsers to speed up page speeds. Many of them increase resource usage in the process.

&gt;Web browsers have gotten to be MUCH more resource intensive than the IE6 days. Try loading any &quot;modern&quot; site on a &quot;modern&quot; browser on a netbook. (Or any computer with an Atom processor).They didn&#x27;t, the current web browsers are faster than ever. The problem is that websites are getting heavier and heavier.

IE 6 rightfully deserved this. However, the modern policy of supporting only the latest browsers can also be too extreme.Web browsers have gotten to be MUCH more resource intensive than the IE6 days. Try loading any &quot;modern&quot; site on a &quot;modern&quot; browser on a netbook. (Or any computer with an Atom processor).While its &quot;compatibility&quot; has waned, I really appreciate Opera 12 for its performance on humble machines. No modern browser seems to match its resource usage.

Doing things behind others’ backs is generally unethical. This decision should have been made in the open.

What was unethical about what they did?Risky? Sure. But I don&#x27;t think adherence to corporate policy is an ethical goal

Your comment covers the gamut of ethical theories. A &#x27;code of ethics&#x27; is going to be some combination of deontology and virtue ethics and will typically prohibit cases like this post describes.&gt; In many ways what they did was unethical but the result was probably positive overall.And that kind of thinking is the other, newer branch of ethics: consequentialism&#x2F;utilitarianism.My conclusion is that deontology and virtue ethics are necessary heuristics as actually calculating or estimating the consequences of any action are almost always effectively impossible, but, ultimately, what we care about are exactly those consequences, so we&#x27;re never able to adequately &#x27;cover&#x27; morality without, at least sometimes, explicitly considering them.

There is another thread about a Code of Ethics for developers. This is an interesting case study. In many ways what they did was unethical but the result was probably positive overall. How do you deal with that? Ethics is hard and very dependent on the details of the situation.

That was a scary transition for us, since we did have quite a few legacy browsers regularly accessing our site - we guaranteed support for IE7+ at that time. Extremely thankful for it though, our management wouldn&#x27;t have made that decision without the push.

A bit more recently (I hope), PCI requirements helpfully forced our hand to stop supporting IE8.

where the guy that helped stop the attack got locked up by the US feds for stuff he did in his teens while visiting a security conference. They&#x27;ve kept him locked up on anything they can drum up for the purposes of flipping him. Has it been two years already?

The &quot;ain&#x27;t broke don&#x27;t fix it&quot; attitude makes sense when you consider e.g. a medical scanning device with a Windows-based console. Those things generally live offline and get tested and approved as an integral unit, including the exact software loaded on them at the time.Unfortunately, that attitude in healthcare leaks to things which _are_ connected to the internet, and you get disgraceful incidents like the hacking of Britain&#x27;s NHS in 2017.

Was struggling with legacy IE6 support-hacks too once while building healthcare webapps. In that field, it was more because hospital IT admins lock everything down and upgrading stuff very much falls under the &quot;if it ain&#x27;t broke, don&#x27;t fix it&quot; mantra.We too got fed up with all the IE6-specific hacks we had to maintain. One day on the login page, we added a &quot;IE6 might be a HIPAA violation, please upgrade your system&quot; banner. It was technically true... the browser was well past its end-of-life support and was acquiring a running list of unpatched security holes.Our analytics showed the remaining holdouts upgraded their systems over the next few months.

The press article mentioned is this:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;07&#x2F;14&#x2F;youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;07&#x2F;14&#x2F;youtube-will-be-next-to-ki...</a> news obtained via reader’s tip as was common back then.Those where indeed interesting times at both TechCrunch and YouTube, but...“Glory days well they&#x27;ll pass you by; Glory days in the wink of a young girl&#x27;s eye; Glory days, glory days”

Enjoy it while it lasts. Also posting from Firefox.

I&#x27;m posting from Firefox. You don&#x27;t have to love Chrome to hate IE6.

Also using FF hereIE6 deserved nothing but to be disposed of.Chrome as much as it has its warts is nothing compared to the mess that was IE6

IE6 should already have been dead by that time. Users could have upgraded to IE8 - IE9. Nobody forced anyone to go toward Chrome. The banner in question even randomized the displayed browser icons to avoid pushing Chrome.

The banner specifically suggested upgrading to a new version of IE among other choices, so I don&#x27;t see a problem there. Especially with the randomized order of suggested browsers, this is basically as good-faith as it gets.I don&#x27;t like the Chrome monoculture, but it&#x27;s a different and unrelated issue. IE monoculture was even worse, and it had to die - I just wish the lessons from that weren&#x27;t forgotten so easily.

Incredible how everyone is rejoicing with this story.Enjoy your new Chrome master.

Wasn&#x27;t that at roughly the same time? I think thus explains why the lawyers got nervous about the banner.

That part reminded me of the BrowserChoice.eu site that Microsoft had to put up.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BrowserChoice.eu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BrowserChoice.eu</a>

This is the problem when looking back on the past; you miss the context.  IE6, at the time in 2001, was the fastest most stable browser out there.  It was magnitudes better than Netscape Navigator, which was bloated and far more crash happy.  IE6 wasn&#x27;t always terrible; it was just terrible compared what came after -- which is exactly how things should work.

And IE6 was similarly tons better the Netscape Navigator. It had XmlHttp, inventing Ajax, which revolutionised the web.Easy to forget that now.Also, did you know IE6 pioneered the browser web dev tools? IE6 was the first browser you could debug your JavaScript, css and html, which was copied by firebug about 12 months later. I can&#x27;t even remember what it was called now, IE Dev toolbox? Something strange, you had to download it separately.And Firebug and Chrome Dev tools copied it almost verbatim. I&#x27;ve never seen any sort of acknowledgement of just how much the community owes to that early tool. The announcement blogs about it were still accessible a few years ago.

It is. There is a focus on standards, pushing the technology forward then sharing that with other browsers. Rapid updates. A focus on security and performance. And Chrome is the product, not the operating system its running on. Arguably, you could say that Chrome is actually designed to push you towards the Google Search and Gmail. But its a soft nudge in comparison to IE6 and Windows.I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;ll find that a Pareto Distribution is an unavoidable market phenomenon, but I still believe its healthy for technologists to remain skeptical when one client massively outperforms others.

In this context the comparison is not about the quality of IE6 as a browser, but the control it allowed Microsoft to exert on the internet ecosystem by virtue of its market share. Chrome is now in the same position, holding the vast majority of the www &quot;hostage&quot; to the whims of Google.The longer Chrome stays popular, the more websites will optimize for Chrome, bringing back the days of &quot;Best viewed in Internet Explorer&quot;. And as more and more sites become accessible only in Chrome, user share tilts further in Chrome&#x27;s favor, and so on in the vicious cycle we experienced in the browser dark ages.That&#x27;s the fear, at least. I don&#x27;t think anyone is concerned that Chrome is going to start BSoDing Windows anytime soon.The omens of monopoly are certainly here, though. All of Google&#x27;s websites, which constitute a large percentage of web traffic, have been a &quot;best viewed in Chrome&quot; affair for a few years now. Microsoft recently dropped support for Firefox on the Skype web client. And I&#x27;ve seen my fair share of niche&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;etc websites that are Chrome-only.(FYI, I&#x27;m not personally worried that we&#x27;ll see the same browser dark ages as before, but it&#x27;s something we should be vigilant against.)

&gt;Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other waySoo like - you mean: built in proprietary app stores, random DRM-enforcing blobs with camera&#x2F;microphone access, phone-home tracking behavior, and gobs of memory use?side note: Firefox not IE user.

&gt; (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)Except for the part where you get BSoD and infinite recursion or any of the other stated IE6 nightmares...Really, the only thing Chrome and IE have in common are market share. Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other way as far as being a web dev goes.

According to the screenshot in the article there already was a permanent Chrome ad in the sidebar, so I don&#x27;t really understand why the lawyers were concerned because of an additional banner.

Chromium, to be precise.
I&#x27;ve switched to the new Edge beta at home and prefer it to Chrome.Google Meet does block me though..

I&#x27;d say Safari, particularly the versions of it in iOS with the different WebViews, is the new IE.

I like the lawyers being concerned about the possibility they were pushing Chrome. Obviously Google soon decided that wasn’t a problem.(And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)

A fifth of youtube users were people at work. The same people who aren&#x27;t allowed to change their browser or tell their boss to upgrade to IE8 so they can watch more youtube.

&gt; nobody used IE6 except grandmas and corporations.And a fifth of YouTube users at the time.&quot;IE6 users represented around 18% of our user base at that point. We understood that we could not just drop support for it&quot;

Wow is this ancient history already? At the time is was regarded as completely retarded because nobody used IE6 except grandmas and corporations. So youtube telling us to use IE6 was silly. On top of that, many websites took the popup and made it so you couldn&#x27;t actually see their content under any circumstances. Those sites simply got ignored by literally everyone on a corporate browser.Largely it was a waste of time but it did pique the media&#x27;s interest.

This story is incredible. Someone with a podcast should interview you all!

Did the graph of browser marketshare at the end not mean anything to you? IE6 dropped by half over the next month

I bet plenty of employees upgrade their home computers, though, and eventually started pressuring their IT department to let them use the same modern browsers at work. A CEO asking why they can&#x27;t have Chrome on their work laptop is sometimes all it takes to get the ball rolling.

I think it likely did. When CEO&#x27;s and upper management read stories about how doing away with IE6 is better for security, and then remember they use IE6 for certain things internally, that can spur conversations that cause change. Maybe not immediate change, and maybe it has to percolate through company boundaries where enterprises express their dissatisfaction with the tooling provided them if it requires usage of tools widely believed to be insecure and change finally starts happening.Ultimately, I think top-down change at enterprises is much faster than bottom up, and a national news story is just the sort of thing to spur a lot of top-down changes.

How many employees lied to their boss or IT staff about needing ie7 to watch you tube harder.My guess from my time in the trenches is about 1 in 5.

Did you see the chart of browser usage correlated with this incident? The only precipitous drop in any browser usage occurred when they launched this banner. It was already on a downward trend, but an immediate drop like that is pretty hard to explain away as anything else.

I think it gave people permission to think of IE6 as outdated.  It&#x27;s far easier for a decisionmaker to follow the herd rather than get out in front of him (&#x27;nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft&#x2F;IBM&#x2F;whatever&#x27;): convince him that the herd has turned on IE and he&#x27;ll gladly pitch in.

There&#x27;s no way this banner did anything in reality. Corporations didn&#x27;t upgrade because of their tooling, not youtube.Don&#x27;t underestimate the power of employees to influence employers.iPhones didn&#x27;t end up all over the enterprise space because Blackberry walked away from the market.

From my personal experience corporations didn&#x27;t officially ditch IE6 until they officially ditched Windows XP.  Microsoft dropping support for Windows XP encouraged corporations with expensive support contracts to upgrade their fleet.  This resulted in new hardware, new os, and new default browser.

StatCounter&#x27;s graph of browser version market share for 2009 doesn&#x27;t show the same sharp IE6 drop as the YouTube graph. IE6 users probably just switched another browser when they wanted to watch YouTube. IE6 and IE7 were already on their way out, being replaced by IE8 and Chrome.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;browser-version-partially-combined-market-share&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;worldwide&#x2F;#monthly-200901-201001" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;browser-version-partially-combined...</a>

There&#x27;s no way this banner did anything in reality. Corporations didn&#x27;t upgrade because of their tooling, not youtube. What corporation upgraded to make sure their employees could youtube harder?

It might have even gotten IT the budget to upgrade, too. I bet it was pretty hard for IT to ask for many millions of dollars to upgrade in-house apps to be cross-browser compatible when there was no urgent need. A banner on every exec&#x27;s page makes it easier.

The web was also a bit of a different place back then. I think there were people who were &quot;power users&quot; who used Firefox and Chrome and others who used IE because it was bundled with their browser.

&gt; I wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement?I think this is the answer. Most people at the time weren&#x27;t on IE6 out of choice. The fact that youtube (or more likely google docs) had this banner, gave disgruntled employees a better excuse to force IT to upgrade than &quot;I don&#x27;t like this browser&quot;

The OS upgrade is&#x2F;was free, and IE11 is nearly 6 years old at this point.  There are also other&#x2F;current browsers available for Windows 7.  There&#x27;s really no excuse to not have a current browser.

Win7 is end of life in 2020 in case you were not aware of that.

ADP announced deprecation for IE10 and IE11 last year. They apparently didn&#x27;t realize that Edge doesn&#x27;t run in Win7 which many of their customers still have deployed, given the issues surrounding Win8 and 10.I guess they can use this as an excuse to not upgrade their shitshow flash app that beings a multi-core processor to it&#x27;s knees just navigating between entry fields.

I’m not sure of the relative timing but the Google policy of “we support the last two major releases of the main browsers” also really helped.As a web developer at the time, I could put that in my proposals, saying “it’s the standard Google browser support policy”. At which point clients signed off on not needing legacy browser support.

I was stuck suppporting our biggest customer who ran IE6 until like...2013? Bleh.

&gt; I wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement?It was continuing a movement and giving it visibility outside web developers. The youtube banner happened mid-2009, web developers around the world had soured on IE6 and actively trying to kill it off since 2005~2006.What the youtube banner provided was a way to finally get the word out, and an argument to give PHBs: it became much easier to sell browser upgrades (or not supporting IE6 anymore) when you could point to Youtube &#x2F; Google and go &quot;these folks have put their foot down&quot;.

Current apps I&#x27;m working on test for async function support (ES2017) and if the browser doesn&#x27;t support it redirects to `&#x2F;legacy.html` ... it&#x27;s not public facing but that was the break point for supporting the application properly... anything newer is polyfilled with babel.

I&#x27;m glad you&#x27;ve actually measured this, because you&#x27;ve saved me from doing it! Killing off our &quot;update your browser&quot; nag on our sites has been something I&#x27;ve been considering for a while.Over the last week we hit the jackpot at work, in that we had errors come into Rollbar caused by every version of Internet Explorer we don&#x27;t support all the way back to 6. Yes, there was a little celebration in our dev team when we scored our first IE6 exception. :)

IE6 was pretty awesome when it was released... not having to support IE4.x and NN4.x when it hit sufficient market share was really nice. Eventually it became the next boat anchor. IE10-11 is the current boat anchor, and will probably cycle out within the next year. Already have internal apps with no IE support at all, and only the most recent Edge release.The perspective on outdated (insecure) browsers is becoming more broadly accepted.

We had a program that drew a map + path along the map... one customer complained about it taking 3 minutes to draw the path. Customer had an AMD 1400+ or something that was like 8 years old at the time. Threw my hands up in the air when they showed the system properties over a remote session.We installed Firefox 4 and it ran at a perfectly fine speed...

IE6 was insanely bad. Later browsers worked somewhat.

&gt; They just clicked through the pop-up, presumably without reading it.That&#x27;s what you train users to do when you show them intrusive popups that aren&#x27;t actually important.

This is the first example I&#x27;ve ever heard of where a browser-upgrade banner worked. Every time I&#x27;ve tried it on sites I&#x27;ve worked on, the &quot;please upgrade&quot; banner does nothing.Years ago, we even tried turning it into an intrusive pop-up for a percentage of users. They just clicked through the pop-up, presumably without reading it.I wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement?&gt; Between YouTube, Google Docs, and several other Google properties posting IE6 banners, Google had given permission to every other site on the web to add their own. IE6 banners suddenly started appearing everywhere. Within one month, our YouTube IE6 user base was cut in half and over 10% of global IE6 traffic had dropped off while all other browsers increased in corresponding amounts. The results were better than our web development team had ever intended.

I suspect a large part of the success of the campaign had to do with all the news sites covering the story. Those stories would have been seen by a lot of users, regardless of which browser version they were using.

Yeah, but the effect of the banner on the graphs of each was sharp and immediate.

IE7 did have tabs. In fact, it was one of the main features. They didn&#x27;t make significant standards compatibility improvements until IE8, and only really in IE9. IE10 was the first one (since 6) to actually be comparable to other modern browsers.

IE7 did have tabs. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Internet_Explorer_7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Internet_Explorer_7</a>

IE7 was only for a short time the newest Microsoft browser. IE8 lived for a long time, untill eventualy IE9 came about.IE7 didn&#x27;t have tabs, IE8 did.

More than that, the graph demonstrates how growth of IE overall dropped off. Up until then IE7 was replacing IE6. After that, no later version of IE ever topped the previous version.

&gt; people on ie7 because it came with Vista probably had a more capable&#x2F;pushy update systemthe people on vista had the pushiest update system of all: vista was terrible, and most users (especially organizational users) switched to windows 7 ASAP.

People who upgraded to IE7 were capable and willing to upgrade, and more likely to upgrade to a later version when available.IE8 was the included browser with Windows 7, which was generally well received compared to Vista which included IE7.The timing lines up within the release window of IE 8 (March 2009) and Windows 7 (July 2009), so potentially a lot of upgrade push from other things in the air at the time.Edit to add: people on ie7 because it came with Vista probably had a more capable&#x2F;pushy update system than those on XP with ie6; but I don&#x27;t remember the details on how microsoft system updates worked at the time.

Here&#x27;s StatCounter&#x27;s graph of browser version market share for 2009. IE6 and IE7 were already on their way out, being replaced by IE8 and Chrome.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;browser-version-partially-combined-market-share&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;worldwide&#x2F;#monthly-200901-201001" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;browser-version-partially-combined...</a>

MS xml apis were loaded as activex components, that’s probably the reason.

One big problem with IE7 was its asinine &quot;This page contains scripts or ActiveX controls that could access your computer&quot; warning banner that it plastered all over basically everything, including static .htm pages that didn&#x27;t have even a single line of JavaScript, much less ActiveX. I got really tired of answering emails from users who were frightened half to death by that warning. It had the effect of desensitizing users to actual threats, or at least it would have if IE7 had ever gained much popularity.It was a terrible piece of work and I was glad when it never achieved any significant market share.

Interestingly, according to the graph at the end, IE6 was already well on its way out and they only accelerated its death by a few months. The real effect seems to have been stopping IE7 dead in its tracks, and almost single-handedly catapulting IE8 to the top. A most peculiar effect, despite the banner&#x27;s promotion of IE8, since only IE6 users should have seen it!I smell an untold story... maybe one of the other teams&#x27; banners was accidentally visible to IE7 users as well? Or did IE7 sometimes spoof IE6?

The sad truth about proper channels is that they often forget those things as well.

Also, do it as right and professionally as you can.I mean, randomizing the order is obviously the right thing to do when you hear it. The reason companies don&#x27;t want people doing this without going through the proper channels is... what if the boss hadn&#x27;t happened to think of it, or hadn&#x27;t been in on it?Of course, in reality in this case, they would have just fixed it when they noticed, it in fact wouldn&#x27;t have been a legal disaster. But anyway.

Beautiful illustration of what keeps bad ideas going, and what it takes to break them.&gt; Our boss, in on the conspiracy with us, had thoughtfully recommended that we randomize the order of the browsers listed and then cookie the random seed for each visitor so that the UI would not jump around between pages, which we had done.It&#x27;s not exactly clear whether the boss was in on the conspiracy - or whether this was a story told to satisfy the lawyers. If not, this seems a viable strategy for managing the temporary blowback of bending the rules to do the right thing: if you can, make sure your boss ends up looking good.

Ah the good old days, I too remember accidentally crashing ie6 computers WITH CSS.

This is a great story about how company culture can get in the way of progress. Thank you &quot;OldTubers&quot; for getting this started!

Remember those &quot;Best viewed with Netscape&quot; and &quot;Best viewed with IE&quot; buttons that people plastered on their sites in the 1990&#x27;s? Or my favorites, &quot;Best viewed with Lynx&quot; and &quot;Best viewed with a Tuba.&quot;The entire point of the end of the browser wars was to restrict websites to acceptable clients, i.e., those that provided reasonable support for web standards.

Yes, IE quirks were hard to deal with, especially when making complex designs.However, this is setting a precedent for restricting websites to certain &quot;acceptable&quot; clients, which is not a good direction.

If this article had a &quot;Buy me a beer&quot; link I would have done that 10 times. This team has likely personally saved me 100 hours of pointless labor.

Ha! Awesome story, thanks for the write up Chris! We probably shared some classes together at RIT.

It&#x27;s close enough to being a legal problem that an internal lawyer immediately responded, specifically with the issue of &#x27;why did you put Chrome first&#x27;?That there were options, doesn&#x27;t absolve them of possible anti-competitive acts.For example, imagine that they did this to a browser made by a small company? Or another search engine?Google has enough power that it doesn&#x27;t need to form an overt strategy in many of these areas. Just by having assertive employees, loose rules, and Engineers not considering implications beyond their noses ... they can make all sorts of little &#x27;wins&#x27; like this.Today, the Chrome&#x2F;Mozilla market share issue is fundamentally about power, not about &#x27;the better product&#x27; and has Google has an infinite amount of money to subsidize that layer of the market, they will dominate, much as they do with Android. If the iPhone weren&#x27;t one of the greatest products of a generation, and it were just some other thingy ... then Android would be fully dominant as well. Arguably the only reason that Mozilla exists is to allay concerns of competition.Google has an incredible amount of power, I&#x27;m actually thankfully it&#x27;s not aggressively abused, but soon as the founders leave, culture erodes, other priorities sink in, I believe there&#x27;s little doubt that bias will creep into search engine results, for example.

&gt; Edit: this is exactly what a monopolizer looks like in action. One tactical move at a time, until they have full control of an adjacent layer in the value chain. In this case browsers.I think this was fundamentally different than a monopoly move. A monopolistic action would require a user of one Monopoly service to use another service by the supplier, such as a browser. That is absolutely not what happened here. In this case, YouTube asked people to upgrade to a number of options, including a newer version of IE. Notice that they did not require tying of one of their services with another. I think that makes it completely different.

It would be a funny thing were it not for the fact that we have a massive company doing blatantly anti-competitive things.If the Feds every want to try to break up G, this will be submitted as evidence.Edit: this is exactly what a monopolizer looks like in action. One tactical move at a time, until they have full control of an adjacent layer in the value chain. In this case browsers.

This is a fun story and an easy read. I like how much hand wringing there was about possibly favoring Chrome. Earlier this year YouTube showed me a similar banner: &quot;Watch YouTube videos with Chrome. Yes, get Chrome now.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;x8cFCcB2&#x2F;Google.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;x8cFCcB2&#x2F;Google.png</a>

On behalf of the entire Internet-using world, thank you.

wow. This story is one of my favorite read so far. thank you for sharing it.

&gt; Between YouTube, Google Docs, and several other Google properties posting IE6 banners, Google had given permission to every other site on the web to add their own.This was one of the happiest days off my web development career when I could finally tell clients to drop IE6 support because &quot;even Google is doing it.&quot;Amazing to hear how the tail wagged the dog to achieve this :)

don&#x27;t forget that China practically runs on pirated Windows XP, without any service packs and no updates.

It is 2019 and Chinese dotcoms still design for IE6. Reason? XP is still the &quot;default OS&quot; with megatons of hardware for things like POS terminals, fapiao printers, biometric systems, passport&#x2F;rfid scanners not shipping with drivers for anything other than XP.

&gt; To cement their authority over the YouTube codebase during the integration into Google, the early engineers created a specialized permission set called “OldTuber”. OldTuber granted you the ability to completely bypass the new Google-oriented code enforcement policies, enabling anyone holding it to commit code directly to the YouTube codebase, with only the most glancing of code reviews from anyone. No need for code readability. No need for exhaustive tests. No need for maintaining code coverage. If you broke the site by improperly wielding OldTuber status, it was on your head and you would lose the privilege immediately, if not your job. So you just had to be a good citizen and never break the site.Oh man. At our org, we called this &quot;being a cowboy.&quot; We have a lot of process to prevent cowboys now. Oh, the good ol&#x27; days haha.

&gt;Our most renegade web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor, and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review.I love this so much, it&#x27;s so punk-rock. It&#x27;s like John Henry&#x27;s signature on the Declaration of Independence.

I was working on an SPA around this time in an internal environment at a large bank. IE6 was the bane of my existence and the memory leaks in IE&lt;8 made the application unusable after being open for around 5 hours. The early solution was to close the application at lunch, the longer term was portable firefox and later an exception for Firefox proper for those users specifically, while IE8 exploration for support was in progress.Around the same time, there was a Chrome in IE plugin that was also suggested for other applications but never got approved.People complain about the progression&#x2F;changes in JS since around 2010 (node, commonjs, es5+). But nothing is so bad as dealing with the really old browsers. IE6 was decent at release but became a boat anchor to the industry. Even then, you couldn&#x27;t pay me enough to ever support IE4.x + NN4.x ever again.Wonderful story.

The biggest irony I see here is Microsoft being unable to gain control of their IE user base in any meaningful way.We still see this today with the fragmentation of IE and Edge.

That one deserves a Balls Of Steel award. As a long time web dev, thank you for the service you have done to my life by not having to look after IE6 crap any more.

Man, that screenshot made me miss the times when the number next to a browser&#x27;s name actually had some kind of meaning and jumping two integer version numbers actually meant significant differences.

Nice strawman you’ve got there. Does it have a name?

They were planning on using an exploit to crash the browser... Did I misunderstand?EDIT: yes I did. Thanks for making me go back and read carefully rather than jumping to conclusions.

Calm down, they just put a banner suggesting an upgrade up.

EDIT: I misunderstood the article. Nothing to see here.

Fascinating read. I&#x27;ve worked with legacy IE a lot and that often included IE6 but never came across that &lt;img&gt; bug. Who would have thought a missing src could do that.I don&#x27;t know why I get these warm fuzzies when reading about the Internet of yesteryear.

Well, they are heroes, they deserve more than a beverage. Some kind of medal at least.

I&#x27;m not one for hero worship, but I want to buy everyone involved a beverage.From &#x27;08-&#x27;10, I was in web design &amp; development at a company that was neck-deep in IE6 dependency. The animus I harbored for IE6 was so intensely palpable that there were days where I was mere moments from getting a tattoo permanently documenting my burning hate for what I still reckon as the worst piece of software ever known, based on reach, potential for issues caused, and total net effort expended on all mitigations.

I&#x27;m pretty sure everyone conspired to kill IE6 ten years ago.

Besides being a great story, this is a perfect example of how corporations aren&#x27;t people.Corporations don&#x27;t have single agendas, they don&#x27;t think with one mind, they can&#x27;t be simplified to a single narrative.Rather, they&#x27;re collections of 1,000&#x27;s of individual each doing their own theing, and the CEO is trying (and often failing) to herd the cats in a single logical direction.Plenty of good things (like this) can come out of it. But also plenty of bad things, like security breaches, anticompetitive behavior, and invasions of privacy.Whenever anyone says &quot;because Google always does &lt;x&gt;&quot; or &quot;Google is always like &lt;x&gt;&quot;, a story like this is a great antidote.

Best post on HNews for this year, can we have a HNews best of the year edition? :D

Not all heroes wear capes. This was amazing!

I remember that day this banner showed up. My team at the company I was working for at that time was trying to do bleeding edge web development and we desperately tried to convince management to drop IE6 support too. This helped a lot. It’s amazing to read this story and I only can say thank you OldYoutubers!

I&#x27;m not comfortable with this. why should we need to avoid code reviews, sacrifice readibility and bypass tests to make up for poor business decision making?

<pre><code> OldTuber granted you the ability 
 to completely bypass the new 
 Google-oriented code enforcement 
 policies, enabling anyone 
 holding it to commit code 
 directly to the YouTube 
 codebase, with only the most 
 glancing of code reviews from 
 anyone. No need for code 
 readability. No need for 
 exhaustive tests. No need for 
 maintaining code coverage. If 
 you broke the site by improperly 
 wielding OldTuber status, it was 
 on your head and you would lose 
 the privilege immediately, if 
 not your job. So you just had to 
 be a good citizen and never 
 break the site.
</code></pre>
I have a secret theory from seeing this at a few companies by now; I think that it’s nearly critical to deploying complex &#x2F; cloud-based stacks. There’s so much unique infrastructure to production that at some point you need a few people at least with engineering &#x2F; ops expertise who can be the unblocker for getting something seeded or whatever. I’ve seen this either done explicitly or through a slow burn of acquiring grants over time which just never get revoked. But now I’m curious seeing it elsewhere if this is just a common and sort of necessary thing that happens.

Epic.
Thank you for your service to the web!

I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s really better or I&#x27;m just used to the current UI

Aside: Look how much nicer the old Youtube looks in that screenshot. That&#x27;s giving me nostalgia.

Frightening abuse of power :-(Sorry to disagree with the current &quot;you&#x27;re my hero&quot; trend, but in my mind, this story just show that a bunch of irresponsible hackers can do whatever they want to ease their work - for which they&#x27;re paid btw - without any regard on the impacts to users that may rely on the service.This time, it was only showing a warning message (that may have frightened some people)... and what&#x27;s the next step? Decide to allow only Chrome-users to use youtube? When a company try to reach a monopoly status, it bear a social responsability.(anyway: I&#x27;m happy for IE6 been a thing of the past)

First they came for the IE6ers but I didn’t speak out because I hated IE6...

But what was the alternative before? Remember none of us could watch Netflix on Linux because they built the whole thing on Silverlight.

&gt; For example, tomorrow Google can implement a DRM that would require a plugin that works on Windows, Android (with Google Play Services) or Mac, but not on LinuxI was reading your comment and wasn&#x27;t sure if it&#x27;s well hidden sarcasm or you are seriously don&#x27;t know this already happened:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19553941" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19553941</a>Basically you cannot watch high resolutions streams on Linux already even in Google Chrome because of DRM Google among others helped to push into HTML specification.

Google is still doing this on stuff like Hangouts or Meet, where it tells you it won&#x27;t work in Safari. But changing the user agent has worked for me.

When Skype decides your browser is unsupported, it means you can&#x27;t use it at all: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pix.toile-libre.org&#x2F;upload&#x2F;original&#x2F;1556784915.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pix.toile-libre.org&#x2F;upload&#x2F;original&#x2F;1556784915.png</a>

Just because a browser is unsupported doesn&#x27;t mean it won&#x27;t work; it means they&#x27;re not going out of their way to fix it if a problem does occur.

Here is a trick: change UA to Edge 15 on Windows (or something that&#x27;s supported) and Skype will magically work (tested on Debian, audio call also works). I also recommend running this under a separate profile or user account so that Microsoft is unable to track you on other sites.

&gt; Another example is Web version of Skype which is very picky and doesn&#x27;t work in many browsers, like mobile browsers, or slightly outdated Firefox.My Firefox is up to date (60.6.1esr), and Skype Web tells me it&#x27;s unsupported and refused to work.

Unless you change user-agent to &quot;Edge 15&quot; and it starts working, including audio calls (tested on Debian and FF60 ESR).

&gt; Another example is Web version of Skype which is very picky and doesn&#x27;t work in many browsers, like mobile browsers, or slightly outdated Firefox.AFAIK Web Skype no longer works in any version of Firefox.

To anyone thinking it was a good deed: please remember that later Google used similar techiniques against other browsers, like Opera. They showed a warning about an &quot;unsupported browser&quot; but if the user changed user-agent to Firefox or Chrome, everything worked. Another example is Web version of Skype which is very picky and doesn&#x27;t work in many browsers, like mobile browsers, or slightly outdated Firefox.For example, tomorrow Google can implement a DRM that would require a plugin that works on Windows, Android (with Google Play Services) or Mac, but not on Linux. After all, Linux is not a DRM-friendly system (allowing the user to hack anything is not what copyright holders want), and almost nobody uses it on desktop, so why bother supporting it? Or Google can use it against new, not yet very popular browser, to slow its adoption.

That is awful behavior on the part of those YouTube devs. It speaks very poorly of them.

Yeah agreed, although you could almost say the same thing about devs who started in the early Firefox era and how they have no frame of reference for the awful Netscape 4.x pain that IE 4-6 made go away...

Yes. IE9 was an improvement over IE8, which was a big improvement over IE7, which was a huge improvement over IE6. I don&#x27;t have experience before that, but my understanding of history is that things were even worse before IE6.

And somehow IE5.5 was even worse. There was a brief period whereby CSS was becoming more popular and the recommended approach for layouts (_&quot;tables are for tabulated data, not layouts&quot;_), but IE5.5 still had enough market share to warrant trying to make it _somewhat_ work with the div&#x2F;CSS based layout. Ugh.

Anyone that started developing in the IE9 era or later cannot comprehend how painful it was to develop for IE6. You simply have no frame of reference whatsoever. Any gripes you have about IE9 or later sound like a joke in comparison. Even IE8 was a huge improvement.

The particular change Chris is referring to was in implementing delay load for the related video thumbnails.  Now as you may imagine the &#x2F;watch page gets most of the traffic and is hyper optimized.  Now imagine every load of &#x2F;watch hitting the much more dynamic and personalized and much less optimized homepage 10-15 times :)

Oh, God. I forgot about the empty src bug. YouTube wasn&#x27;t the only substantial Google service affected by it from time to time. But I remember it differently.Yes, it triggered a GET for &#x2F;. But that generated HTML (usually the service&#x27;s homepage, as was our case), which the browser would attempt to parse as an image, obviously failing. It would not trigger a recursive fetching of all the resources on the page. Even without recursion, it already inflicted major damage, because our service&#x27;s homepage was dynamic, while the resources linked from it were mostly static (and thus a lot cheaper, as well as cacheable). I think I would have noticed if it multiplied other traffic, not just the homepage.This was the bane of my existence for many months. Every few weeks I would have to fire up Dremel and try to figure what was causing the spurious page loads. I hated and still hate SQL, so that was no fun. I knew when it was time to investigate thanks to our human monitoring system: our PMs would get excited or puzzled by a sudden jump in the page view dashboards. (They lived by those graphs...)Thank you Chris and co. for your contributions in killing the browser version from hell.

And this is how you hack organizations:&quot;Shortly thereafter, the Google Docs engineers whipped up their own IE6 banner and pushed it into production, presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals.&quot;

Perfect timing.  For anyone not familiar from experience, personally I was doing heavy web development during this period and IE6 was a scourge - even IE7 was much better. The version was clearly beyond long in the tooth, having been released sometime like 2000 or 2001. Indeed, usage was still somewhere around 10%. If we didn’t support it, people would complain to us or even advertisers.

Such a great story how to work, take risk and innovate in a large org.

They should get a medal.Microsoft was way behind in the Web era and IE6 was attempt to slow everybody else down and create web that works only with MS software.The IE6 was prime example of the Microsoft strategy of embrace and extend using market share. They build software that included harmful features, broke standard or for no reason and had intentional inconsistencies.Microsoft was pure &quot;engineering evil&quot; during the Gates era.

As a web developer, I can&#x27;t thank these heroes enough.

&gt; Between YouTube, Google Docs, and several other Google properties posting IE6 banners, Google had given permission to every other site on the web to add their own.YouTube started a domino effect with this. I remember I was working at a web agency at the time. And when I saw YouTube&#x27;s banner regarding IE6 it was my &quot;this is it&quot; moment. I rushed my boss trying to convince him we should stop making our client websites IE6 compatible. He considered it and started incorporating YouTube IE6 stance in every client proposal from that moment.

There must be a similar story about youtube deprecating flash...

We all killed IE6 eventually, the big shops and the little shops. Big shops had their banners, us little ones had their banter. Telling those in accounting, marketing, support, and sales to use FireFox, Chrome, or whatever instead of IE6 so we didn&#x27;t have to #%$&amp; with debugging IE6 on extranets.Man those were rough days.

I&#x27;m a bit salty about this - I&#x27;ve proposed the &quot;dropping ie6 banner without actually dropping support&quot; banner at multiple jobs in the past. Each time it was met with &quot;ooooh we can&#x27;t do that&quot; by product. I didn&#x27;t have the guts to just go ahead and do it.On a related note, I feel like most of my career has been spent preaching things that I should have just asked for forgiveness for. I can&#x27;t count the number of times I&#x27;ve heard &quot;we want x, but we can&#x27;t do anything to achieve x&quot;. Psssst, you can - you just need to do it. Scared of change&#x2F; the unforseen. If you don&#x27;t know what the ramifications are going to be, there could be positive ones you&#x27;re missing too. Try it. If it&#x27;s truly sinking your ship, kill it. Otherwise sail off into the promised land. Rinse and repeat. Be brave. That&#x27;s my advice.

Good fucking riddance. I was a junior web developer during the IE5&#x2F;6 days.Microsoft, that fucking browser caused so much grief YOU LITERALLY HAVE NO IDEA unless you were there. My cursewords are barely scratching the surface of the rage. Frontend dev would literally double in work if requirements dictated IE compliance. I have no doubt that it informed both the decision of many devs to head to the backend and stay there (like I did) as well as Material Design from Google which is not nearly so dependent on spacing being rendered precisely.

Microsoft started pushing MS IE 8 at that time, too. And you could see that modest MS IE 7 drop before &quot;watershed moment&quot; mirrors MS IE 8 jump.But MS IE 6 was significantly more entrenched: I have seen plenty of MS IE 6 - only sites and internal tools, but never MS IE 7 - only ones. They existed, probably, but were obviously were rare.

How come IE7 plunged nearly as severely at the same timing as IE6? Was the banner shown for IE7 too?

This story reminds me of the ones about the beginnings of the Apple Macintosh over on folklore.org.  If you haven&#x27;t been to that site you&#x27;re really missing out.

I remember showing this banner to our boss saying &quot;hey, we should do that too, look EVEN GOOGLE DOES THAT&quot; at the company I worked back then.And we did.

A Conspiracy to Kill IE6