
A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - zacman85
http://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
======
jrochkind1
Oh my, this is amazing.

I'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 "oh
yeah, we should do that too" (although they apparently got the necessary
approvals however that was done at Google, it was easier to do because they
figured "well, youtube must have done due dillegence before doing it.")

Amazing!

I don't know how they didn't all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including
everyone who set up the special "OldTuber" 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't happen so much in a more professionalized industry.

~~~
ljm
It's a fascinating tech story, but it would easily turn into a horror if we
weren't talking about something like a video hosting platform.

Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive 'old
timer' permissions that basically backdoored the company'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.

~~~
darawk
This is exactly the sort of riskless sentiment that causes something like IE6
to persist forever.

> 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?

~~~
saagarjha
From what it looks like, this is quite literally the ability to get code into
the main codebase with no oversight. Even without malicious intentions, it
seems very easy to do something awful by accident.

~~~
derefr
The main codebase... of a video sharing site. With no SLAs, and (at the time)
no partner video-hosting agreements.

The most awful thing that could happen to 2006-era YouTube: they could stop
delivering ad impressions for an hour or two. Oh wait, no; 2006-era YouTube
_didn 't even have ads yet_.

~~~
jrochkind1
I suppose more awful thing could be an accidental XSS or other vulnerability.

~~~
darawk
Which would then compromise what? People's youtube accounts?

~~~
0xDEFC0DE
IE6 had plenty of nasty vulns by the time this banner had gone up
(06/14/2009): [https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
list/vendor_id-26/p...](https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
list/vendor_id-26/product_id-124/version_id-8371/Microsoft-IE-6.0.html)

That said, the people with this access probably knew WTF they were doing.

~~~
darawk
Exactly. They were getting rid of IE6

------
cpeterso
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's recent thread about Google
"amateur hour" and "oopses" that only affected Firefox:

[https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686](https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686)

~~~
mherdeg
Is there a good catchy name for this "oops" stuff? It's very interesting, an
interesting modern take on "embrace and extend" or "FUD".

~~~
reaperducer
I'm not sure what the term for the tech world is, but something similar seems
to exist in many areas of many fields.

It'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't get sued over
it.

"That overdue invoice? Oh, we never received it. Send it again." "Oh, Jenna in
accounting must have it, but she's on vacation for two weeks." "Oh, that's in
process." "Oh, we still haven't received it." "Oh, you have a signature on a
certified mail delivery? It must be upstairs for approval." "Oh, we've already
run all the checks for the month, it'll be in next month's batch."

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.

"Oh, we really need this on the site today." "No problem. I can do that as
soon as you buy more hours."

"Oh, we'll get that paid next week." "No problem, your website went offline an
hour ago and will be back when you buy more hours next week." __Poof!
__payment comes through three minutes later.

~~~
sverige
As a class, lawyers and doctors are some of the cheapest people you'll ever
meet. They don't want to pay full price for anything. I have tons of stories
about this; one of the most egregious was a lawyer who made over a million a
year and sued his mechanic to avoid paying an $800 repair job to his
daughter's old VW Bug.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
That's a nice anecdote. Here's mine- my orthodontist gives out a little wooden
token for not breaking anything, wearing one of their t-shirts to the
appointment, and answering a trivia question right. You can either return 30
tokens for a $10 gift card (great for teenagers, who always need more Amazon
money, it seems), or he has this nice big box that you can put tokens in. Once
the box is full, he plans a trip and goes to some third-world country to help
out for a bit (generally it's his summer vacation.) He has gone on a trip for
the last eight or nine years.

Maybe my population is skewed- two of the three doctors I see are Eagle
Scouts, but _not everyone is a cheapskate_.

~~~
glenneroo
That anecdote actually sounds like you're supporting GP's cheapskate doctor
hypothesis...

Wow only _30_ visits to the doctor and you get a $10 gift card? I have never
been to an orthodontist but how often does one typically go? 30 times a year?
Are those visits free?

On top of that, you have do free advertising (t-shirt) for him, plus having
some useless trivia knowledge... I hope the questions are simple enough for
people to always get right? This would just be pure frustration for me, I have
learned over the years to literally dread trivia "opportunities".

And the best part... you can otherwise donate your paltry gift card to help
him pay to go on vacation, albeit helping people, but you said vacation,
therefore I'm guessing he works a couple days.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
The cost of the braces & treatment was competitively priced, too. It's almost
always the parents who pay for it- the gift cards go to the teenagers and make
them financially invested in being good to their faces.

    
    
      Are those visits free?
    

The cost of visits is included in the overall price, as are replacement
brackets / etc. for the first few. The advisement / planning process part is
free, and they weren't pushy _at all_ \- my parents asked if my then-8-year-
old sibling (he has over _jet_ ) needed braces, too, and they recommended
waiting until all the baby teeth came out. [ For comparison, other companies /
doctors I've heard of recommend them to young kids frequently, even though the
teething process causes structural changes to the jaw and generally makes
another round of braces a necessity].

    
    
       On top of that, you have do free advertising (t-shirt) for him,
    

The T-Shirts are really nice, TBH. The company name / logo was on the back,
with a simple message on the front, and they were made of soft, puffy
synthetic stuff. I _liked_ wearing them- and wearing them was optional- there
were a few times when I changed into the shirt in the bathroom five minutes
before the appointment and took it off five minutes after- they're pretty lax
about it.

plus having some useless trivia knowledge...

The trivia questions were pretty easy- "what is the outer layer of your teeth
called?", "what is the capital of $state?" etc. It's not that big of a deal.

    
    
       something something vacation
    

He pays for most of it, and it's a _lot_ of work, in a third-world country.
Not much by way of resorts there, though there are days off & hikes.

------
floatrock
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 "if it ain't
broke, don't fix it" 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 "IE6 might be a HIPAA violation, please upgrade
your system" 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.

~~~
titanomachy
The "ain't broke don't fix it" 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's NHS in 2017.

~~~
Quarrelsome
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've kept
him locked up on anything they can drum up for the purposes of flipping him.
Has it been two years already?

------
dfabulich
This is the first example I've ever heard of where a browser-upgrade banner
_worked_. Every time I've tried it on sites I've worked on, the "please
upgrade" 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?

> 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.

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

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

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Whelp, and in this case, nobody got fired, either. Good point!

------
codedokode
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 "unsupported browser" 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'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.

~~~
SXX
> 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

I was reading your comment and wasn't sure if it's well hidden sarcasm or you
are seriously don't know this already happened:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941)

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.

~~~
Teknoman117
But what was the alternative before? Remember none of us could watch Netflix
on Linux because they built the whole thing on Silverlight.

~~~
SXX
It's not really about alternatives. Before no one pretended that proprietary
blob is some part of the web - everyone knew it for what it is: ugly black-box
plugin. And any engineer knew how easily is it to bypass said DRM.

Problem with what Google among others did is that they was actually in
position to push against making something like that part of the web
specification. Yet they went all in and what worse become gatekeeper for new
web browsers to implement Widevine DRM.

Same way Google might push for more open Android ecosystem, but it's not their
interests so they did the opposite. And with all Chrome-exclusive features and
AMP it's pretty much the same thing happening.

------
dTal
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's promotion of IE8, since only IE6 users should have seen it!

I smell an untold story... maybe one of the other teams' banners was
accidentally visible to IE7 users as well? Or did IE7 sometimes spoof IE6?

~~~
mpol
IE7 was only for a short time the newest Microsoft browser. IE8 lived for a
long time, untill eventualy IE9 came about.

IE7 didn't have tabs, IE8 did.

~~~
nicoburns
IE7 did have tabs. In fact, it was one of the main features. They didn'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.

~~~
tracker1
IE8 was also the first IE to address a lot of the memory leaks that older
versions had. DOM <-> JS access was referenced via COM interfaces and out of
scope cleanup didn't cross bounds in earlier versions.

IE8 did have a really bad bug around the JSON.parse implementation though.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Oh, it had a JSON bug? The fact it supported JSON was one of my favourite
parts :(

~~~
tracker1
If you modified the Object.prototype or Array.prototype (which was common at
the type with libraries like PrototypeJS) and used a rehydration function with
JSON.parse, the runtime would throw an error you couldn't catch, and stop JS
functioning. In IE 8.x ... almost worse, the JSON.parse function was locked...
I wound up using a wrapper JSON.parse2 or something that was the JSON library
edited to attach to parse2 for IE8, other browsers would alias parse as
parse2.

I then used the parse2 in everything at that time. In the end, it sucked and
I'm glad I don't have to do it anymore. IE8's quirks were what I would
consider the last bad version of IE... since then it's been mostly okay on
release, but ages rapidly, but enough turnover that you aren't on it too long.
Until current IE11 as it's tied to windows releases, and some people/orgs
didn't upgrade.

------
crazygringo
Besides being a great story, this is a _perfect_ example of how corporations
aren't people.

Corporations don't have single agendas, they don't think with one mind, they
can't be simplified to a single narrative.

Rather, they're collections of 1,000'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 "because Google always does <x>" or "Google is always
like <x>", a story like this is a great antidote.

------
acheron
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.)

~~~
umvi
> (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.

~~~
mattmanser
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'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'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.

~~~
forgotmypw3
IE6 also had the first reasonably performant CSS/DOM implementation that was
not just bolted on... Unless Opera 3.x came before?

~~~
mattmanser
I made a pivot table implementation in IE6 that used XSLT transforms.

It was actually blazing quick, far, far faster than the JS implementation I
tried (like instant vs 20 seconds). While XSLT was hard to develop in and
perhaps deserves to die its death, it really was a quite amazing bit of tech.

------
puzzle
Oh, God. I forgot about the empty src bug. YouTube wasn't the only substantial
Google service affected by it from time to time. But I remember it
differently.

Yes, it triggered a GET for /. But that generated HTML (usually the service'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'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.

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

------
tracker1
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<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/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't pay me enough to ever support IE4.x + NN4.x ever
again.

Wonderful story.

------
skunkworker
I loved the part when the Docs team added their own because they were
"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."

------
everdev
> 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 "even Google is doing it."

Amazing to hear how the tail wagged the dog to achieve this :)

------
settsu
I'm not one for hero worship, but I want to buy everyone involved a beverage.

From '08-'10, I was in web design & 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.

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

------
apo
Beautiful illustration of what keeps bad ideas going, and what it takes to
break them.

> 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'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.

~~~
jrochkind1
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't want people doing this without going through
the proper channels is... what if the boss _hadn 't_ happened to think of it,
or hadn'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't have been a legal disaster. But anyway.

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

------
NeoBasilisk
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.

~~~
antod
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...

------
vilius
> 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's banner regarding IE6 it was my
"this is it" 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.

------
syphilis2
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: "Watch YouTube videos with Chrome. Yes, get Chrome now."
[https://i.postimg.cc/x8cFCcB2/Google.png](https://i.postimg.cc/x8cFCcB2/Google.png)

------
sethammons
> 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 "being a cowboy." We have a lot of process
to prevent cowboys now. Oh, the good ol' days haha.

------
kstrauser
You did God's work, son. As a bitter veteran of the browser wars, thank you.

------
Iv
And this is how you hack organizations:

"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."

------
stiGGG
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!

------
LocalPCGuy
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's great to hear the story behind those banners.

------
maxxxxx
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.

~~~
stestagg
What was unethical about what they did?

Risky? Sure. But I don't think adherence to corporate policy is an _ethical_
goal

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

------
oxguy3
They risked their jobs for the greater good. Absolute heroes.

------
timw4mail
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 "modern" site on a "modern" browser on a netbook. (Or any
computer with an Atom processor).

While its "compatibility" has waned, I really appreciate Opera 12 for its
performance on humble machines. No modern browser seems to match its resource
usage.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
>Web browsers have gotten to be MUCH more resource intensive than the IE6
days. Try loading any "modern" site on a "modern" browser on a netbook. (Or
any computer with an Atom processor).

They didn't, the current web browsers are faster than ever. The problem is
that websites are getting heavier and heavier.

~~~
stestagg
Unfortunately 'resource intensive' != 'slower'.

There are many tricks played by modern browsers to speed up page speeds. Many
of them increase resource usage in the process.

------
ronilan
The press article mentioned is this:
[https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-
ki...](https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-
ie6-support-goodbye/) 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 'll pass you by; Glory days in the wink of a young
girl's eye; Glory days, glory days”_

------
code_duck
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.

------
hoorayimhelping
> _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's so punk-rock. It's like John Henry's signature on
the Declaration of Independence.

~~~
eigenloss
John Hancock?

------
crakenzak
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.

------
pmarreck
Good fucking riddance. I was a junior web developer during the IE5/6 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.

------
forgotmypw3
Yes, IE quirks were hard to deal with, especially when making complex designs.

However, this is setting a precedent for restricting websites to certain
"acceptable" clients, which is not a good direction.

~~~
madhadron
Remember those "Best viewed with Netscape" and "Best viewed with IE" buttons
that people plastered on their sites in the 1990's? Or my favorites, "Best
viewed with Lynx" and "Best viewed with a Tuba."

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.

------
Nokinside
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 "engineering evil" during the Gates era.

------
beaker52
I'm a bit salty about this - I've proposed the "dropping ie6 banner without
actually dropping support" banner at multiple jobs in the past. Each time it
was met with "ooooh we can't do that" by product. I didn'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't count the
number of times I've heard "we want x, but we can't do anything to achieve x".
Psssst, you can - you just need to do it. Scared of change/ the unforseen. If
you don't know what the ramifications are going to be, there could be positive
ones you're missing too. Try it. If it's truly sinking your ship, kill it.
Otherwise sail off into the promised land. Rinse and repeat. Be brave. That's
my advice.

------
systematical
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't have to #%$& with debugging IE6 on extranets.

Man those were rough days.

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

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

------
jitbit
I remember showing this banner to our boss saying "hey, we should do that too,
look EVEN GOOGLE DOES THAT" at the company I worked back then.

And we did.

------
anon87345

      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.
    

I have a secret theory from seeing this at a few companies by now; I think
that it’s nearly critical to deploying complex / cloud-based stacks. There’s
so much unique infrastructure to production that at some point you need a few
people at least with engineering / 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.

~~~
justatdotin
I'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?

------
baybal2
It is 2019 and Chinese dotcoms still design for IE6. Reason? XP is still the
"default OS" with megatons of hardware for things like POS terminals, fapiao
printers, biometric systems, passport/rfid scanners not shipping with drivers
for anything other than XP.

~~~
ronsor
don't forget that China practically runs on pirated Windows XP, without any
service packs and no updates.

------
navs
Fascinating read. I've worked with legacy IE a lot and that often included IE6
but never came across that _< img>_ bug. Who would have thought a missing
_src_ could do that.

I don't know why I get these warm fuzzies when reading about the Internet of
yesteryear.

------
Causality1
Man, that screenshot made me miss the times when the number next to a
browser's name actually had some kind of meaning and jumping two integer
version numbers actually meant significant differences.

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

------
Corrado
This story reminds me of the ones about the beginnings of the Apple Macintosh
over on folklore.org. If you haven't been to that site you're really missing
out.

------
user17843
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.

------
olivierduval
Frightening abuse of power :-(

Sorry to disagree with the current "you're my hero" 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'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'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'm happy for IE6 been a thing of the past)

------
quickthrower2
Aside: Look how much nicer the old Youtube looks in that screenshot. That's
giving me nostalgia.

~~~
baud147258
I don't know if it's really better or I'm just used to the current UI

------
needle0
How come IE7 plunged nearly as severely at the same timing as IE6? Was the
banner shown for IE7 too?

~~~
trgamefn
Microsoft started pushing MS IE 8 at that time, too. And you could see that
modest MS IE 7 drop before "watershed moment" 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.

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

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

------
briznian
I'm pretty sure everyone conspired to kill IE6 ten years ago.

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

------
tuxt
Thanks for doing that.

------
mukundmr
As a web developer, I can't thank these heroes enough.

------
mschuster91
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.

------
ArtDev
Epic. Thank you for your service to the web!

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

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

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

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

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

------
joshdance
This is amazing.

------
pier25
Not all heroes wear capes. This was amazing!

------
forgotAgain
Thank you.

------
Iv
Just one word: Thanks!

------
sonnyblarney
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.

~~~
dwheeler
> 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.

~~~
sonnyblarney
It's close enough to being a legal problem that an internal lawyer immediately
responded, specifically with the issue of 'why did you put Chrome first'?

That there were options, doesn'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'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 'wins' like this.

Today, the Chrome/Mozilla market share issue is fundamentally about power, not
about 'the better product' 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'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'm actually thankfully it's not
aggressively abused, but soon as the founders leave, culture erodes, other
priorities sink in, I believe there's little doubt that bias will creep into
search engine results, for example.

------
samgranieri
Bravo!

------
throwaway66666
EDIT: I misunderstood the article. Nothing to see here.

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

~~~
throwaway66666
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.

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

------
pjmlp
Incredible how everyone is rejoicing with this story.

Enjoy your new Chrome master.

~~~
kstrauser
I'm posting from Firefox. You don't have to love Chrome to hate IE6.

~~~
pjmlp
Enjoy it while it lasts. Also posting from Firefox.

------
behringer
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'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's interest.

~~~
archgoon
> nobody used IE6 except grandmas and corporations.

And a fifth of YouTube users at the time.

"IE6 users represented around 18% of our user base at that point. We
understood that we could not just drop support for it"

~~~
behringer
A fifth of youtube users were people at work. The same people who aren't
allowed to change their browser or tell their boss to upgrade to IE8 so they
can watch more youtube.

~~~
shawabawa3
Youtube adding the banner triggered google docs to add the banner.

People could tell their boss they needed to upgrade browser to use google docs
for work

~~~
behringer
Oh right I forgot that part of the story as soon as I closed out and came back
here. Duh. I could see that being the culprit!

