YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye

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132 pointstransburgh48 comments

I have a dream... of a world where everyone upgrades their browser in a timely way... where security fixes get applied and botnets don't spread... where the millions of developer hours formerly spent on browser hacks are instead used to add features... where advanced CSS selectors can be safely used... I have a dream of a world where one day, rounded corners can be made with a simple declaration and work in all browsers... where proprietary plugins are not needed for video, and tiny vector graphics scale beautifully on the page... where browsers will be judged by the usefulness of their features, not by the OSes they were bundled with..

Your imaginary place starts out sounding like a Mac User's world then drifts off into Lake Wobegon territory.

This is actually a change welcome by most IE6 users.

Well. Not by their users, but by their administrators. We now know that most people still on IE6 are on IE6 because they are forced by corporate policy, corporate policy that most likely forbids You Tube use if there are no filters in place that make consumption impossible in the first place.

If you want to provide a web service to the corporate internet, you are still stuck with the crap that is IE6 (customers of a customer of ours was still using IE 5.5 (on NT4 in the year 2008 - sigh) it took some real convincing to make them accept the fact that the user experience could be degraded).

I've noticed a few corporates who still need IE6 for some internal web apps also installing firefox recently due to not being able to have two versions of IE installed.

I always figured the absolute best way to support old IE6 developed intranet apps would be a single site browser tool with embedded IE6. Like fluid for windows.

The problem is Microsofts boneheaded decision to make IE systemwide. Upgrading to IE7 also upgrades all webcontrol instances. So this doesn't seem feasable.

This is the kind of big player that will cause people to upgrade. It's the old saying that if people want dancing bunnies, people will click on anything put in front of them to get those dancing bunnies.

Other apps will still have to support IE6 though, b/c BigCo's IT Department will be happy to stick with the browser that prevents employees from watching YouTube.

Maybe IT Departments would notice if google.com did the same thing aswell. Would that be monopolistic however?

Probably. Which is where it gets murky because that might not be a bad thing.

(though they dont have a legit reason for blocking it - there is nothing IE6 doesnt "support" the G search needs)

They would lose search market to bing in that case.

Not necessarily, I finally dumped my hotmail account when it told me it doesn't support Chrome.

I believe brand familiarity would carry a lot of people into using a different browser. Google did huge things by implementing the Firefox download links. If you go to google.com and you get prompted "Runs best with Chrome" and you get a slightly delayed service, people will switch. If they slowed the service down until its still faster than MSN, Ask and Yahoo, but slower than google's supposed to be, you'd be able to force many people over to the browser of your choosing for speed.

Also Bing doesn't work particularly well. It also complains at me because I'm using Chrome.

Not to suggest that people are evangelical about using IE6 but wouldn't your example make the case that users would rather switch services than change browsers? Anything to reduce IE6 usage is good news to web developers though.

I finally dumped my hotmail account when it told me it doesn't support Chrome.

So you chose to switch e-mail providers rather than browsers. The parent is saying the same holds true for search engines, which have a lot smaller barriers to switching services.

It'd probably be monopolistic if they blocked IE8, and maybe IE7. But I think IE6 is legitimately old enough, with enough known problems, that it would be justifiable if it ever came up in court.

I wonder if facebook was paid by adobe when facebook videos began requiring Flash 10. That's the only reason I upgraded flash.

Having developed Flash plugins and applications in the past, you need at least Flash player 9+ to do anything remotely powerful.

It' doesn't take much for Google's web search to support an outdated browser since it uses minimal javascript, so Google will only lose out by blocking IE6.

This is great. It's going to take big and popular sites like Youtube and Facebook to finally kill of IE6.

Except most IE6 installs are in corporate environments, which most likely already block youtube and facebook, so it won't really change anything.

Now if we could get Sun, IBM, and Google to all swear off IE6, maybe some IT departments would grudgingly update to IE7.

I believe it's a myth that "most" IE6 are corporate environments. The diagrams about IE6 work day-weekend fluctuation wasn't that big.

I expect at least half of the active IE6 users to be users of the category "installed Win XP and doesn't care about updates or browsers". At least I know some people like this.

Corporate laptops make no distinction of work days. Digg's recent survey shows that a most of their users who are on IE 6 are so because of work.

http://blog.digg.com/?p=878

There are also a lot of bots that label themselves as IE 6 which inflates the effect.

Digg's recent survey shows that a most of their users who are on IE 6 _[and are interested in completing a survey about what browser they use]_ are so because of work.

If someone is already in the aforementioned "installed Win XP and doesn't care about updates or browsers" category, I think it's pretty safe to assume they might be in the "doesn't want to be bother with a survey about their browser" category.

Also, the people who are not upgrading their browsers (mostly because they are not technologically savvy) are not frequenting websites like YouTube and Facebook. My grandfather doesn't know what Facebook is and is definitely still running IE6 (even though I tried to get him onto Firefox)!

do him a service and at least upgrade to IE8, it also does wonders if you just replace his 'internet' icon with a browser thats more recent, he'll never know the difference but will thank you later that he can watch videos of his grandsons on youtube.

The largest IE6 population work wise is the US Government and they have little to no intention of upgrading to anything else anytime soon.

I'm currently stuck in the hell of developing web applications for government contracts that are targeted to IE6. For example... No multi css class support in IE6, which kills lots of JS libs. Horrible stuff.

You MIGHT be right, but I do web application development for government, and I was recently surprised when my new laptop was delivered with IE8 on the standard image.

For this particular agency, EDS is their GSS provider, so if EDS is incorporating IE8 into their ESA image, I wouldn't expect that it's too far off at other agencies they provide general support services for.

Of course, now I've got to make all the apps I've written work in IE6 AND IE8, alongside Firefox, which they're also piloting. I'm pleased at their progress, while staying wary of all the work it's going to bring my way.

That's promising to hear. I worked IT for a large government contractor for years and it often took long amounts of time to roll out new images to the whole company. Considering the average lease time of 3 years, a full IE8 rollout could certainly take time.

I was especially surprised to hear about the piloting of Firefox. Is there a site somewhere to keep up on technology rollouts across the different US Gov't agencies? Or at least the ones EDS provides support for?

It's probably 'sensitive' information, as knowledge of the underlying tech gives the bad guys a guide on what to target, or at least that would be the ISSO friendly answer.

I don't know of anything that trends across gov, but if you had tie-ins with DOD, they'd probably give you the answer for that, as most of the other agencies I've dealt with sort of fall in line with them.

It just occurred to me that Blogabond (one of my sites) will be pretty much the LAST site on the internet to drop IE6 support.

It's a travel blog host, which means that it will always have users hitting it from a public machine in rural Laos. Having used that machine, which runs Windows 95 and shares an AOL Free Trial dialup connection with 5 of its brethren in an open-air hut on generator power, I can state with confidence that it is not scheduled for an upgrade any time soon.

You make your bed, you lie in it I guess.

That is a good start. Now, if they will disallow IE7 and IE8, we can get IE users back to a version that does not use ActiveX for plugins. That would be a great security step.

No Safari link? Given that Chrome is WebKit, you'd think they'd throw a little love back.

Safari is pointless on Windows.

It's an alternate browser that supports modern web standards. How is it any more 'pointless' than Firefox or Chrome?

It basically only exists for the sake of testing without buying a Mac. Since it pulls in an entire Cocoa/Carbon/whatever stack, it uses an intense amount of ram and performs slowly.

I'm not on Windows, so I haven't used it myself, but you're the first person I've heard complain about it since 4.0 dropped (though, granted, I don't listen very hard).

More important, I would think, is that it supports the web standards that Google has a vested interest in seeing flourish, and it would be another shiny logo that might get clicked rather than the IE7/8 link they put up out of necessity.

I use Safari on my Macbook and have it installed on my windows machine for testing.

- IE8 is there because it is a clear upgrade path

- FireFox is there because it has well known brand recognition

- Chrome is there because they want to push their own tech

What would Safari there gain? It would simply be one more choice. I think the three are already too many.

It's not targeted at real people who have to make a choice about which to download. It's been pretty well established that the only people still on IE6 are stuck behind IT policies that don't allow for upgrades. It's just a political statement, then, an attempt to drive home the point that IE6 is an ancient and decrepit bane on society and technology. The more sheer embarrassment that you can pile on top of these IT departments, the more frustration you ladle into the end users that they can direct into getting their company policies changed (rather than, hopefully, directed at you), the better. I think showing a wider variety of actually viable browsers makes that point better (hell, throw Opera in), because it makes it obvious just how far behind the rest of the world has left IE6.

I suppose, given that Safari, while being an excellent browser, on Windows it is not such a great experience and just feels weird, it is reasonable to not list it as an upgrade option for IE6 users. By the nature of the situation, this only happens on Windows.

Huh? WebKit is a portable version of KHTML, with an abstraction layer to handle the QT dependencies. Most of the love would be aimed at the KDE developers.

You used the word "portable". I used the word "love". Reflect for a second on what those particular terms mean in this particular context.

Give up? Okay: there are no mainstream KHTML browsers available for Windows, except for Safari and Chrome via WebKit, only one of which has a link showing up on YouTube.

I used the word love too actually. But I thought you meant thanks when you said it. I guess you didn't.

I meant self-serving strategery.

This seems like a move by Google to push faster adoption of HTML 5.

IE7 & 8 do not support HTML 5 either

Goodbye or not, I can't believe anyone would kiss IE6.

The best thing about IE6 is that you can crash it with ease by adding a few bytes of CSS code on your website.

the revolution has begun

I love how this news is at least a week or so old. Nice job, Techcrunch.

I think I speak for web developers everywhere when I say: DIE, IE6, DIE! DIE DIE DIE!!!!!!

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