
  YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye  - transburgh
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/
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billybob
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..

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

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pilif
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).

~~~
danw
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.

~~~
jpcx01
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.

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pchristensen
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.

~~~
Ardit20
Maybe IT Departments would notice if google.com did the same thing aswell.
Would that be monopolistic however?

~~~
mcav
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.

~~~
marcog1
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.

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

~~~
Xichekolas
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.

~~~
beza1e1
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.

~~~
jonknee
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.

~~~
JshWright
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.

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jasonkester
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.

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SecurityMatters
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.

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

~~~
nailer
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.

~~~
calambrac
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.

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

~~~
calambrac
I meant self-serving strategery.

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

~~~
barredo
IE7 & 8 do not support HTML 5 either

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

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

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vaksel
the revolution has begun

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

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

