58 ms·

A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

2195 points by zacman85 7y ago

jrochkind1 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    Yes. I love the story, and if I had been in charge I don't see how I could do anything but fire the whole lot of them. Although... the number of people involved in the "OldTubers" backdoor seems to have been pretty substantial, I don't know if they could really have fired all of them... But who is anyone to say if doing anything is "right"? We're all equally qualified to have a moral compass.
    - derefr 7y ago
      I mean, Google just paid a ton of money to acquihire this team, and then the acquihired team is going to turn around and fire all the people Google paid for? That doesn't sound like an arrangement Google would be happy with. (Which is to say, with more generality: people who get acquihired are basically temporarily invulnerable to office politics.)
      - ascar 7y ago
        The engineers involved were not part of YouTube at the time of acquisition. YouTube also wasn't really acquihire. The site had a huge user base Google wanted.
    - ljm 7y ago
      I'd keep them on board but I'd get rid of that backdoor and encourage them to adapt to the new situation, for a number of reasons: - 'OldTubers' vs. the new Googlers is a clear us v. them thing. Bad for culture, especially when you get privileges on top. - Their plan was actually successful so there must have been a thing or two to learn on the product side, even if it's as simple as accepting engineering input and understanding the difficulty of maintaining stuff (as opposed to relying on the analytics). - There's some good thinking and ingenuity in there, despite the methodology. I'd want to keep hold of that talent while dealing with burgeoning elitism. Up to them to quit if they don't like the changes. Fire them if their contribution begins to suffer.
      - jrochkind1 7y ago
        Yes, you're right, there are options available other than 'firing' and that's the right one. This is why I'm not a manager. :)
      - user5994461 7y ago
        It's not a us v. them thing since they were not OldTuber and the article says that many other people were granted the access in spite of not being OldTuber.
      - 7y ago
  - darawk 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        I suppose more awful thing could be an accidental XSS or other vulnerability.
        darawk 7y ago
        Which would then compromise what? People's youtube accounts?
        0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
        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/product_id-124/version_id-8371/Microsoft-IE-6.0.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p... That said, the people with this access probably knew WTF they were doing.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    They weren't working at a medical or financial company so your argument is pointless.
  - user17843 7y ago
    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'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's easy for the blog author to say "I have no idea why we weren't fired" but I bet back then it was all fun and games. (Getting fired isn't even that bad, what really harms people is when everyone around them starts to tell them things like "You could have ruined everything!") 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.
    - user5994461 7y ago
      What makes you think it's different in financial organizations?
      - user17843 7y ago
        I just implied it is different because the industry was so young, it is solidified now, thus resembling other industries. (i.e. in the corporate world the hierarchies in big tech now resemble the hierarchies in big [insert any other industry])
        antoineMoPa 7y ago
        In my experience, I think it is a question of developper count and company culture. Larger corporations have processes & checks that smaller businesses do not always have.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jeromebaek 7y ago
    This is correct, but there's a complication: YouTube today is a lot more than the YouYube of 2006. Today, people's livelihoods depend on YouTube. Naturally, I'd expect more responsible engineers.
  - megaremote 7y ago
    If enough developers want to do something, you can't stop them. You can make it take more developers, that is the best you can do.
    - profalseidol 7y ago
      Pretty sure there was enough developers whom hated JavaScript. What happened is that made more if it. A reality that we would still be supporting IE6 today because so many businesses still use it seems realistic to me. Maybe we would have developed a facade for it.. This brave actions of the OldTuber saved us a ton of effort. Hopefully somebody from Oracle sneak in Clojure in the JVM!
  - baud147258 7y ago
    > Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive 'old timer' permissions that basically backdoored the company's engineering processes Have 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel Edit: to be fair, it look like he took the blame for all the failings of the company
    - makapuf 7y ago
      The whole question about Kerviel is if his management let him "bypass" regulatory safety nets or if he did it by himself.
  - ufmace 7y ago
    This seems like a kind of silly objection. It's kind of like - I have some knives in my kitchen for cutting food, as does most of the world'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'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' 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?
- AceJohnny2 7y ago
  > 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. 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'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't realize they have. For example in my team we're having a lot of difficulty filling job openings (we're picky and frankly our interviewing pipeline sucks). As such, there's a significant cost/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)
  - Zak 7y ago
    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'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.
    - neilv 7y ago
      I'm really glad this method of execution was an honest banner. (The biggest problem here might've been cutting colleagues out of the loop it sounds like they were probably supposed to be in.) When I started reading the story, I was afraid it was going to go in the direction of sneaky sabotage, like intentionally causing performance problems or crashes. There've been accusations of that happening, within the last year. Earlier, there was a long history in the computer industry of sneaky sabotage of competitors, which was suggested by the (perhaps only a joke, in that particular case) mantra "DOS isn't done, till Lotus doesn't run".
      - closeparen 7y ago
- Causality1 7y ago
  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 "suggestions" just to switch your default browser away from Edge.
  - tatersolid 7y ago
    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.
    - buffalo2391 7y ago
      This isn't exactly accurate, I've had multiple menus telling me to switch to edge from chrome.
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        Perhaps I'm not remembering it right but doesn't it day something like "you should use a stable modern browser instead! Are you sure you don't want to keep using Edge"??
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        It's more like "Windows has a modern browser called Edge, you might want to try it out; are you sure you want to change the default?".
      - ddingus 7y ago
        They are missing an awesome opportunity. Provide a place for people to say why they won't. A lot of that input will be garbage. Some seriously laughable in a good way, a few gems. Why not get them?
    - terinjokes 7y ago
- user5994461 7y ago
  >>> 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. That's really blowing it out of proportions. It'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's a job well done with nothing to criticize. It's a BAU example of how works get done in a large bureaucratic organization.
  - gpvos 7y ago
    BAU = Business As Usual
    - aouk 7y ago
      thx
  - simonh 7y ago
    I can guarantee you if this happened in the organisation I work in, they would have been fired. It's a different kind of organisation, in a different kind of business though.
- Iv 7y ago
  This part is why it worked: "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." Go with the Zeitgeist, and you'll have a lot of wind in your sails.
- underwater 7y ago
  > I don't know how they didn't all get fired. That seems extreme. I've worked in some organizations where the assumption is that engineers aren'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'm guessing that YouTube was much more in the latter category.
  - solveit 7y ago
    Yes, but >They will generally work with the product owners is exactly what the engineers didn't do in this story. The company was completely blindsided.
- westoque 7y ago
  What's funny is we actually used YouTube as our "gauge" on what browsers to support. We also built the narrative that: "If YouTube doesn't work on this browser, then we will not support it"
- nl 7y ago
  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. 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.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  It's just like Murder on the Orient Express! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(... >The next morning, Poirot discovers Ratchett was murdered during the night, having been stabbed a dozen times. [...] >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.
- tjpnz 7y ago
  They got visits from PR and Legal but there'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?
  - stingraycharles 7y ago
    Perhaps there was no PM because there was no official Project?
- zrobotics 7y ago
  This is a classic "better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission" story. They didn'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.
beforelate 7y ago
You can take your IE6 and shove it up your ass. There are many reasons on why it should have been out of the picture that go beyond conspiracy.
kstrauser 7y ago
You did God's work, son. As a bitter veteran of the browser wars, thank you.
oxguy3 7y ago
They risked their jobs for the greater good. Absolute heroes.
SeanAnderson 7y ago
This was a really great read. Thanks for sharing and thanks for putting the nail in the IE6 coffin.
skunkworker 7y ago
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."
crakenzak 7y ago
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.
LocalPCGuy 7y ago
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.
cpeterso 7y ago
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
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Yeah the part about giving the whole web "permission" to deprecate IE6 should ring alarm bells, even though it's not literal.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    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'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.
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      I’m somehow a bit prickled by this. The ‘rest of the web’ had these banners for a long while before Google ever got around to adding it. My websites (and anything I worked on) certainly did.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  Both?
- nvarsj 7y ago
  Interesting thread... but I really doubt the oopses were intentional. Instead it's just a case of nih syndrome, where the engineers have a myopic view and only test/build for the internal Google infra and apps. The same thing happens in golang and Kubernetes.
timw4mail 7y ago
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 7y ago
  >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 7y ago
    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.
maxxxxx 7y ago
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 7y ago
  What was unethical about what they did? Risky? Sure. But I don't think adherence to corporate policy is an ethical goal
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    Doing things behind others’ backs is generally unethical. This decision should have been made in the open.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Almost certainly HN would be ranting about the fact that Youtube is _discriminating_ against one in five users or some other crackpot shit.
- aeorgnoieang 7y ago
  Your comment covers the gamut of ethical theories. A 'code of ethics' is going to be some combination of deontology and virtue ethics and will typically prohibit cases like this post describes. > 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/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're never able to adequately 'cover' morality without, at least sometimes, explicitly considering them.
floatrock 7y ago
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.
- kevan 7y ago
  A bit more recently (I hope), PCI requirements helpfully forced our hand to stop supporting IE8.
  - chewmieser 7y ago
    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't have made that decision without the push.
- titanomachy 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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?
ronilan 7y ago
The press article mentioned is this: https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-ki... 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”
pjmlp 7y ago
Incredible how everyone is rejoicing with this story. Enjoy your new Chrome master.
- kstrauser 7y ago
  I'm posting from Firefox. You don't have to love Chrome to hate IE6.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Enjoy it while it lasts. Also posting from Firefox.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  Also using FF here IE6 deserved nothing but to be disposed of. Chrome as much as it has its warts is nothing compared to the mess that was IE6
- Raphmedia 7y ago
  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.
- int_19h 7y ago
  The banner specifically suggested upgrading to a new version of IE among other choices, so I don't see a problem there. Especially with the randomized order of suggested browsers, this is basically as good-faith as it gets. I don't like the Chrome monoculture, but it's a different and unrelated issue. IE monoculture was even worse, and it had to die - I just wish the lessons from that weren't forgotten so easily.
acheron 7y ago
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.)
- skunkworker 7y ago
  That part reminded me of the BrowserChoice.eu site that Microsoft had to put up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    Wasn't that at roughly the same time? I think thus explains why the lawyers got nervous about the banner.
- umvi 7y ago
  > (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.
  - wvenable 7y ago
    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't always terrible; it was just terrible compared what came after -- which is exactly how things should work.
    - TimTheTinker 7y ago
      > IE6 wasn't always terrible For web apps, IE6 and anything that came before was always terrible. It used to be hard to build a decent web app, even if most of your code ran on the server. There is a huge qualitative difference between building for an ad-hoc platform and one that is rigorously built and tested against some externally defined standard. Sure, Chrome may be lagging in some areas, but--like all modern browsers--the platform it provides conforms rigorously to the standards it supports. And that makes all the difference.
sara1732 7y ago
Fish walking with legs like humans See the video on link below http://bit.ly/2XRGyYD http://bit.ly/2XRGyYD
baybal2 7y ago
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 7y ago
  don't forget that China practically runs on pirated Windows XP, without any service packs and no updates.
behringer 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    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.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - anyfoo 7y ago
      But maybe their boss wanted to keep watching YouTube at work, too.
    - shawabawa3 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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!
Psyonic 7y ago
This story is incredible. Someone with a podcast should interview you all!
dfabulich 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?
  - apcragg 7y ago
    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.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Did the graph of browser marketshare at the end not mean anything to you? IE6 dropped by half over the next month
  - kstrauser 7y ago
    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't have Chrome on their work laptop is sometimes all it takes to get the ball rolling.
dTal 7y ago
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?
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  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.
- mpol 7y ago
  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.
  - dTal 7y ago
    Yeah, but the effect of the banner on the graphs of each was sharp and immediate.
    - skullt 7y ago
      The graph is measuring in six month intervals, so the March 2009 release of IE 8 needs to also be considered.
      - DuskStar 7y ago
        It's not measuring in six month intervals, that's just the scale at the bottom. There are peaks and troughs that are very clearly higher resolution than that.
  - msvan 7y ago
apo 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    The sad truth about proper channels is that they often forget those things as well.
joshe 7y ago
Ah the good old days, I too remember accidentally crashing ie6 computers WITH CSS.
hberg 7y ago
This is a great story about how company culture can get in the way of progress. Thank you "OldTubers" for getting this started!
forgotmypw3 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
samantha_thomas 7y ago
Internet Explorer is still breathing?
gorpomon 7y ago
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.
overcast 7y ago
Ha! Awesome story, thanks for the write up Chris! We probably shared some classes together at RIT.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - sonnyblarney 7y ago
    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.
syphilis2 7y ago
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
dreamcompiler 7y ago
On behalf of the entire Internet-using world, thank you.
justplay 7y ago
wow. This story is one of my favorite read so far. thank you for sharing it.
everdev 7y ago
> 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 :)
sethammons 7y ago
> 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.
hoorayimhelping 7y ago
>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 7y ago
  John Hancock?
tracker1 7y ago
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.
user17843 7y ago
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.
mschuster91 7y ago
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.
Causality1 7y ago
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.
throwaway66666 7y ago
EDIT: I misunderstood the article. Nothing to see here.
- Gigablah 7y ago
  Nice strawman you’ve got there. Does it have a name?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Epskampie 7y ago
  Calm down, they just put a banner suggesting an upgrade up.
  - throwaway66666 7y ago
    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.
navs 7y ago
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.
settsu 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Well, they are heroes, they deserve more than a beverage. Some kind of medal at least.
briznian 7y ago
I'm pretty sure everyone conspired to kill IE6 ten years ago.
crazygringo 7y ago
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.
tschellenbach 7y ago
Best post on HNews for this year, can we have a HNews best of the year edition? :D
samgranieri 7y ago
Bravo!
pier25 7y ago
Not all heroes wear capes. This was amazing!
stiGGG 7y ago
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!
anon87345 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?
ArtDev 7y ago
Epic. Thank you for your service to the web!
quickthrower2 7y ago
Aside: Look how much nicer the old Youtube looks in that screenshot. That's giving me nostalgia.
- baud147258 7y ago
  I don't know if it's really better or I'm just used to the current UI
olivierduval 7y ago
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)
codedokode 7y ago
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.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  First they came for the IE6ers but I didn’t speak out because I hated IE6...
- SXX 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    But what was the alternative before? Remember none of us could watch Netflix on Linux because they built the whole thing on Silverlight.
    - SXX 7y ago
      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.
totalFaggots 7y ago
God, hacker news, you are such fucking pussies.
JohnFen 7y ago
That is awful behavior on the part of those YouTube devs. It speaks very poorly of them.
NeoBasilisk 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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...
- dancek 7y ago
  Yes. IE9 was an improvement over IE8, which was a big improvement over IE7, which was a huge improvement over IE6. I don't have experience before that, but my understanding of history is that things were even worse before IE6.
- tristanperry 7y ago
  And somehow IE5.5 was even worse. There was a brief period whereby CSS was becoming more popular and the recommended approach for layouts (_"tables are for tabulated data, not layouts"_), but IE5.5 still had enough market share to warrant trying to make it _somewhat_ work with the div/CSS based layout. Ugh.
beforelate 7y ago
You can take your IE6 and shove it up your ass
puzzle 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 :)
Iv 7y ago
Just one word: Thanks!
Iv 7y ago
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."
code_duck 7y ago
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.
tuxt 7y ago
Thanks for doing that.
ngcc_hk 7y ago
Such a great story how to work, take risk and innovate in a large org.
Angela_Marshall 7y ago
I can't blame them. Internet Explorer is a bad platform for developing. There are so many bugs found throughout IE that just aren't there on any other major browser.
Nokinside 7y ago
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.
mukundmr 7y ago
As a web developer, I can't thank these heroes enough.
vilius 7y ago
> 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.
jokoon 7y ago
There must be a similar story about youtube deprecating flash...
systematical 7y ago
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.
sara1732 7y ago
They found world's biggest fish Even you can't believe how big fish is this That's unbelievable http://bit.ly/2FHl4pM http://bit.ly/2FHl4pM A cute dog is dancing in video Just watch this video and try to control your laugh http://bit.ly/2ZK1XVs http://bit.ly/2ZK1XVs See how a Turkey saved the life of his friends Even those birds also have love in their hearts http://bit.ly/2WhAiZS http://bit.ly/2WhAiZS Guy made world record He drive car on two wheels See his video how he is driving http://bit.ly/2ZOYaWX http://bit.ly/2ZOYaWX See the video of this man he is catching balls and he is wearing blindfold http://bit.ly/2Vx4Mdl http://bit.ly/2Vx4Mdl
forgotAgain 7y ago
Thank you.
beaker52 7y ago
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.
pmarreck 7y ago
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.
needle0 7y ago
How come IE7 plunged nearly as severely at the same timing as IE6? Was the banner shown for IE7 too?
- trgamefn 7y ago
  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.
Corrado 7y ago
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.
jitbit 7y ago
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.
joshdance 7y ago
This is amazing.

2195 points by zacman85 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  Yes. I love the story, and if I had been in charge I don't see how I could do anything but fire the whole lot of them. Although... the number of people involved in the "OldTubers" backdoor seems to have been pretty substantial, I don't know if they could really have fired all of them... But who is anyone to say if doing anything is "right"? We're all equally qualified to have a moral compass.
  - derefr 7y ago
    I mean, Google just paid a ton of money to acquihire this team, and then the acquihired team is going to turn around and fire all the people Google paid for? That doesn't sound like an arrangement Google would be happy with. (Which is to say, with more generality: people who get acquihired are basically temporarily invulnerable to office politics.)
    - ascar 7y ago
      The engineers involved were not part of YouTube at the time of acquisition. YouTube also wasn't really acquihire. The site had a huge user base Google wanted.
  - ljm 7y ago
    I'd keep them on board but I'd get rid of that backdoor and encourage them to adapt to the new situation, for a number of reasons: - 'OldTubers' vs. the new Googlers is a clear us v. them thing. Bad for culture, especially when you get privileges on top. - Their plan was actually successful so there must have been a thing or two to learn on the product side, even if it's as simple as accepting engineering input and understanding the difficulty of maintaining stuff (as opposed to relying on the analytics). - There's some good thinking and ingenuity in there, despite the methodology. I'd want to keep hold of that talent while dealing with burgeoning elitism. Up to them to quit if they don't like the changes. Fire them if their contribution begins to suffer.
    - jrochkind1 7y ago
      Yes, you're right, there are options available other than 'firing' and that's the right one. This is why I'm not a manager. :)
    - user5994461 7y ago
      It's not a us v. them thing since they were not OldTuber and the article says that many other people were granted the access in spite of not being OldTuber.
    - 7y ago
- darawk 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        I suppose more awful thing could be an accidental XSS or other vulnerability.
        darawk 7y ago
        Which would then compromise what? People's youtube accounts?
        0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
        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/product_id-124/version_id-8371/Microsoft-IE-6.0.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p... That said, the people with this access probably knew WTF they were doing.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  They weren't working at a medical or financial company so your argument is pointless.
- user17843 7y ago
  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'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's easy for the blog author to say "I have no idea why we weren't fired" but I bet back then it was all fun and games. (Getting fired isn't even that bad, what really harms people is when everyone around them starts to tell them things like "You could have ruined everything!") 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.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    What makes you think it's different in financial organizations?
    - user17843 7y ago
      I just implied it is different because the industry was so young, it is solidified now, thus resembling other industries. (i.e. in the corporate world the hierarchies in big tech now resemble the hierarchies in big [insert any other industry])
      - antoineMoPa 7y ago
        In my experience, I think it is a question of developper count and company culture. Larger corporations have processes & checks that smaller businesses do not always have.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jeromebaek 7y ago
  This is correct, but there's a complication: YouTube today is a lot more than the YouYube of 2006. Today, people's livelihoods depend on YouTube. Naturally, I'd expect more responsible engineers.
- megaremote 7y ago
  If enough developers want to do something, you can't stop them. You can make it take more developers, that is the best you can do.
  - profalseidol 7y ago
    Pretty sure there was enough developers whom hated JavaScript. What happened is that made more if it. A reality that we would still be supporting IE6 today because so many businesses still use it seems realistic to me. Maybe we would have developed a facade for it.. This brave actions of the OldTuber saved us a ton of effort. Hopefully somebody from Oracle sneak in Clojure in the JVM!
- baud147258 7y ago
  > Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive 'old timer' permissions that basically backdoored the company's engineering processes Have 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel Edit: to be fair, it look like he took the blame for all the failings of the company
  - makapuf 7y ago
    The whole question about Kerviel is if his management let him "bypass" regulatory safety nets or if he did it by himself.
- ufmace 7y ago
  This seems like a kind of silly objection. It's kind of like - I have some knives in my kitchen for cutting food, as does most of the world'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'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' 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?
AceJohnny2 7y ago
> 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. 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'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't realize they have. For example in my team we're having a lot of difficulty filling job openings (we're picky and frankly our interviewing pipeline sucks). As such, there's a significant cost/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)
- Zak 7y ago
  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'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.
  - neilv 7y ago
    I'm really glad this method of execution was an honest banner. (The biggest problem here might've been cutting colleagues out of the loop it sounds like they were probably supposed to be in.) When I started reading the story, I was afraid it was going to go in the direction of sneaky sabotage, like intentionally causing performance problems or crashes. There've been accusations of that happening, within the last year. Earlier, there was a long history in the computer industry of sneaky sabotage of competitors, which was suggested by the (perhaps only a joke, in that particular case) mantra "DOS isn't done, till Lotus doesn't run".
    - closeparen 7y ago
Causality1 7y ago
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 "suggestions" just to switch your default browser away from Edge.
- tatersolid 7y ago
  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.
  - buffalo2391 7y ago
    This isn't exactly accurate, I've had multiple menus telling me to switch to edge from chrome.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Perhaps I'm not remembering it right but doesn't it day something like "you should use a stable modern browser instead! Are you sure you don't want to keep using Edge"??
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        It's more like "Windows has a modern browser called Edge, you might want to try it out; are you sure you want to change the default?".
    - ddingus 7y ago
      They are missing an awesome opportunity. Provide a place for people to say why they won't. A lot of that input will be garbage. Some seriously laughable in a good way, a few gems. Why not get them?
  - terinjokes 7y ago
user5994461 7y ago
>>> 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. That's really blowing it out of proportions. It'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's a job well done with nothing to criticize. It's a BAU example of how works get done in a large bureaucratic organization.
- gpvos 7y ago
  BAU = Business As Usual
  - aouk 7y ago
    thx
- simonh 7y ago
  I can guarantee you if this happened in the organisation I work in, they would have been fired. It's a different kind of organisation, in a different kind of business though.
Iv 7y ago
This part is why it worked: "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." Go with the Zeitgeist, and you'll have a lot of wind in your sails.
underwater 7y ago
> I don't know how they didn't all get fired. That seems extreme. I've worked in some organizations where the assumption is that engineers aren'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'm guessing that YouTube was much more in the latter category.
- solveit 7y ago
  Yes, but >They will generally work with the product owners is exactly what the engineers didn't do in this story. The company was completely blindsided.
westoque 7y ago
What's funny is we actually used YouTube as our "gauge" on what browsers to support. We also built the narrative that: "If YouTube doesn't work on this browser, then we will not support it"
nl 7y ago
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. 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.
DonHopkins 7y ago
It's just like Murder on the Orient Express! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(... >The next morning, Poirot discovers Ratchett was murdered during the night, having been stabbed a dozen times. [...] >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.
tjpnz 7y ago
They got visits from PR and Legal but there'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?
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  Perhaps there was no PM because there was no official Project?
zrobotics 7y ago
This is a classic "better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission" story. They didn'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.

beforelate 7y ago

You can take your IE6 and shove it up your ass. There are many reasons on why it should have been out of the picture that go beyond conspiracy.

kstrauser 7y ago

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

oxguy3 7y ago

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

SeanAnderson 7y ago

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

skunkworker 7y ago

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."

crakenzak 7y ago

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.

LocalPCGuy 7y ago

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.

cpeterso 7y ago

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

rdiddly 7y ago
Yeah the part about giving the whole web "permission" to deprecate IE6 should ring alarm bells, even though it's not literal.
- phkahler 7y ago
  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'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.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I’m somehow a bit prickled by this. The ‘rest of the web’ had these banners for a long while before Google ever got around to adding it. My websites (and anything I worked on) certainly did.
jrochkind1 7y ago
Both?
nvarsj 7y ago
Interesting thread... but I really doubt the oopses were intentional. Instead it's just a case of nih syndrome, where the engineers have a myopic view and only test/build for the internal Google infra and apps. The same thing happens in golang and Kubernetes.

timw4mail 7y ago

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 7y ago
>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 7y ago
  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.

maxxxxx 7y ago

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 7y ago
What was unethical about what they did? Risky? Sure. But I don't think adherence to corporate policy is an ethical goal
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  Doing things behind others’ backs is generally unethical. This decision should have been made in the open.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Almost certainly HN would be ranting about the fact that Youtube is _discriminating_ against one in five users or some other crackpot shit.
aeorgnoieang 7y ago
Your comment covers the gamut of ethical theories. A 'code of ethics' is going to be some combination of deontology and virtue ethics and will typically prohibit cases like this post describes. > 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/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're never able to adequately 'cover' morality without, at least sometimes, explicitly considering them.

floatrock 7y ago

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.

kevan 7y ago
A bit more recently (I hope), PCI requirements helpfully forced our hand to stop supporting IE8.
- chewmieser 7y ago
  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't have made that decision without the push.
titanomachy 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?

ronilan 7y ago

The press article mentioned is this: https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-ki... 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”

pjmlp 7y ago

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

kstrauser 7y ago
I'm posting from Firefox. You don't have to love Chrome to hate IE6.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Enjoy it while it lasts. Also posting from Firefox.
raverbashing 7y ago
Also using FF here IE6 deserved nothing but to be disposed of. Chrome as much as it has its warts is nothing compared to the mess that was IE6
Raphmedia 7y ago
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.
int_19h 7y ago
The banner specifically suggested upgrading to a new version of IE among other choices, so I don't see a problem there. Especially with the randomized order of suggested browsers, this is basically as good-faith as it gets. I don't like the Chrome monoculture, but it's a different and unrelated issue. IE monoculture was even worse, and it had to die - I just wish the lessons from that weren't forgotten so easily.

acheron 7y ago

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.)

skunkworker 7y ago
That part reminded me of the BrowserChoice.eu site that Microsoft had to put up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Wasn't that at roughly the same time? I think thus explains why the lawyers got nervous about the banner.
umvi 7y ago
> (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.
- wvenable 7y ago
  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't always terrible; it was just terrible compared what came after -- which is exactly how things should work.
  - TimTheTinker 7y ago
    > IE6 wasn't always terrible For web apps, IE6 and anything that came before was always terrible. It used to be hard to build a decent web app, even if most of your code ran on the server. There is a huge qualitative difference between building for an ad-hoc platform and one that is rigorously built and tested against some externally defined standard. Sure, Chrome may be lagging in some areas, but--like all modern browsers--the platform it provides conforms rigorously to the standards it supports. And that makes all the difference.

sara1732 7y ago

Fish walking with legs like humans See the video on link below http://bit.ly/2XRGyYD http://bit.ly/2XRGyYD

baybal2 7y ago

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 7y ago
don't forget that China practically runs on pirated Windows XP, without any service packs and no updates.

behringer 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - anyfoo 7y ago
    But maybe their boss wanted to keep watching YouTube at work, too.
  - shawabawa3 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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!

Psyonic 7y ago

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

dfabulich 7y ago

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 7y ago
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?
- apcragg 7y ago
  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.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Did the graph of browser marketshare at the end not mean anything to you? IE6 dropped by half over the next month
- kstrauser 7y ago
  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't have Chrome on their work laptop is sometimes all it takes to get the ball rolling.

dTal 7y ago

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?

Ajedi32 7y ago
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.
mpol 7y ago
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.
- dTal 7y ago
  Yeah, but the effect of the banner on the graphs of each was sharp and immediate.
  - skullt 7y ago
    The graph is measuring in six month intervals, so the March 2009 release of IE 8 needs to also be considered.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      It's not measuring in six month intervals, that's just the scale at the bottom. There are peaks and troughs that are very clearly higher resolution than that.
- msvan 7y ago

apo 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  The sad truth about proper channels is that they often forget those things as well.

joshe 7y ago

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

hberg 7y ago

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

forgotmypw3 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

samantha_thomas 7y ago

Internet Explorer is still breathing?

gorpomon 7y ago

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.

overcast 7y ago

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

sonnyblarney 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  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.

syphilis2 7y ago

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

dreamcompiler 7y ago

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

justplay 7y ago

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

everdev 7y ago

> 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 :)

sethammons 7y ago

> 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.

hoorayimhelping 7y ago

>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 7y ago
John Hancock?

tracker1 7y ago

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.

user17843 7y ago

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.

mschuster91 7y ago

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.

Causality1 7y ago

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.

throwaway66666 7y ago

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

Gigablah 7y ago
Nice strawman you’ve got there. Does it have a name?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Epskampie 7y ago
Calm down, they just put a banner suggesting an upgrade up.
- throwaway66666 7y ago
  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.

navs 7y ago

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.

settsu 7y ago

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 7y ago
Well, they are heroes, they deserve more than a beverage. Some kind of medal at least.

briznian 7y ago

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

crazygringo 7y ago

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.

tschellenbach 7y ago

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

samgranieri 7y ago

Bravo!

pier25 7y ago

Not all heroes wear capes. This was amazing!

stiGGG 7y ago

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!

anon87345 7y ago

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 7y ago
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?

ArtDev 7y ago

Epic. Thank you for your service to the web!

quickthrower2 7y ago

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

baud147258 7y ago
I don't know if it's really better or I'm just used to the current UI

olivierduval 7y ago

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)

codedokode 7y ago

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.

quickthrower2 7y ago
First they came for the IE6ers but I didn’t speak out because I hated IE6...
SXX 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  But what was the alternative before? Remember none of us could watch Netflix on Linux because they built the whole thing on Silverlight.
  - SXX 7y ago
    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.

totalFaggots 7y ago

God, hacker news, you are such fucking pussies.

JohnFen 7y ago

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

NeoBasilisk 7y ago

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 7y ago
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...
dancek 7y ago
Yes. IE9 was an improvement over IE8, which was a big improvement over IE7, which was a huge improvement over IE6. I don't have experience before that, but my understanding of history is that things were even worse before IE6.
tristanperry 7y ago
And somehow IE5.5 was even worse. There was a brief period whereby CSS was becoming more popular and the recommended approach for layouts (_"tables are for tabulated data, not layouts"_), but IE5.5 still had enough market share to warrant trying to make it _somewhat_ work with the div/CSS based layout. Ugh.

beforelate 7y ago

You can take your IE6 and shove it up your ass

puzzle 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 :)

Iv 7y ago

Just one word: Thanks!

Iv 7y ago

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."

code_duck 7y ago

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.

tuxt 7y ago

Thanks for doing that.

ngcc_hk 7y ago

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

Angela_Marshall 7y ago

I can't blame them. Internet Explorer is a bad platform for developing. There are so many bugs found throughout IE that just aren't there on any other major browser.

Nokinside 7y ago

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.

mukundmr 7y ago

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

vilius 7y ago

> 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.

jokoon 7y ago

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

systematical 7y ago

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.

sara1732 7y ago

They found world's biggest fish Even you can't believe how big fish is this That's unbelievable http://bit.ly/2FHl4pM http://bit.ly/2FHl4pM A cute dog is dancing in video Just watch this video and try to control your laugh http://bit.ly/2ZK1XVs http://bit.ly/2ZK1XVs See how a Turkey saved the life of his friends Even those birds also have love in their hearts http://bit.ly/2WhAiZS http://bit.ly/2WhAiZS Guy made world record He drive car on two wheels See his video how he is driving http://bit.ly/2ZOYaWX http://bit.ly/2ZOYaWX See the video of this man he is catching balls and he is wearing blindfold http://bit.ly/2Vx4Mdl http://bit.ly/2Vx4Mdl

forgotAgain 7y ago

Thank you.

beaker52 7y ago

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.

pmarreck 7y ago

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.

needle0 7y ago

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

trgamefn 7y ago
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.

Corrado 7y ago

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.

jitbit 7y ago

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.

joshdance 7y ago

This is amazing.