6 ms·

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" banne

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.
- kbenson 7y ago
  I think it likely did. When CEO's and upper management read stories about how doing away with IE6 is better for security, and then remember they use IE6 for certain things internally, that can spur conversations that cause change. Maybe not immediate change, and maybe it has to percolate through company boundaries where enterprises express their dissatisfaction with the tooling provided them if it requires usage of tools widely believed to be insecure and change finally starts happening. Ultimately, I think top-down change at enterprises is much faster than bottom up, and a national news story is just the sort of thing to spur a lot of top-down changes.
- c0nfused 7y ago
  How many employees lied to their boss or IT staff about needing ie7 to watch you tube harder. My guess from my time in the trenches is about 1 in 5.
- eadmund 7y ago
  I think it gave people permission to think of IE6 as outdated. It's far easier for a decisionmaker to follow the herd rather than get out in front of him ('nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM/whatever'): convince him that the herd has turned on IE and he'll gladly pitch in.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    Whelp, and in this case, nobody got fired, either. Good point!
- reaperducer 7y ago
  There's no way this banner did anything in reality. Corporations didn't upgrade because of their tooling, not youtube. Don't underestimate the power of employees to influence employers. iPhones didn't end up all over the enterprise space because Blackberry walked away from the market.
- chocolatebunny 7y ago
  From my personal experience corporations didn't officially ditch IE6 until they officially ditched Windows XP. Microsoft dropping support for Windows XP encouraged corporations with expensive support contracts to upgrade their fleet. This resulted in new hardware, new os, and new default browser.
- cpeterso 7y ago
  StatCounter's graph of browser version market share for 2009 doesn't show the same sharp IE6 drop as the YouTube graph. IE6 users probably just switched another browser when they wanted to watch YouTube. IE6 and IE7 were already on their way out, being replaced by IE8 and Chrome. http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-partially-combined-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-201001 http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-partially-combined...
shawabawa3 7y ago
> I wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement? I think this is the answer. Most people at the time weren't on IE6 out of choice. The fact that youtube (or more likely google docs) had this banner, gave disgruntled employees a better excuse to force IT to upgrade than "I don't like this browser"
- fgonzag 7y ago
  It might have even gotten IT the budget to upgrade, too. I bet it was pretty hard for IT to ask for many millions of dollars to upgrade in-house apps to be cross-browser compatible when there was no urgent need. A banner on every exec's page makes it easier.
- toastking 7y ago
  The web was also a bit of a different place back then. I think there were people who were "power users" who used Firefox and Chrome and others who used IE because it was bundled with their browser.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
ADP announced deprecation for IE10 and IE11 last year. They apparently didn't realize that Edge doesn't run in Win7 which many of their customers still have deployed, given the issues surrounding Win8 and 10. I guess they can use this as an excuse to not upgrade their shitshow flash app that beings a multi-core processor to it's knees just navigating between entry fields.
- tracker1 7y ago
  The OS upgrade is/was free, and IE11 is nearly 6 years old at this point. There are also other/current browsers available for Windows 7. There's really no excuse to not have a current browser.
  - chris_wot 7y ago
    Notice he said that ADP uses Flash? ADP has always been awful, I only wish they would get taken out by a competitor.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      I don't even think it's possible to run Flash on a Mac currently.
      - snuxoll 7y ago
        Safari still runs Flash, and it can be enabled per-site in Chrome. Thank god, because we just switched to ADP and then there’s VMWare....
      - jamiek88 7y ago
        Easiest via chrome. But it’s been years since I’ve needed it.
        chris_wot 7y ago
        No, it's not easy. I have a Flash based app I can't get out of using. Every day. Every day I have to tell Chrome to allow the app to run Flash. When I close the browser and reopen it, I need to tell tell Flash to "always" use Flash. Chrome's definition of "always" is very different to everyone else's. And that's on purpose. But I have no say in what corporate app I can use, and I have no way of getting it migrated quickly. The Chrome devs seem actively hostile to the poor slob who must us the corporate app and have no way of migrating away from it.
masklinn 7y ago
> I wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement? It was continuing a movement and giving it visibility outside web developers. The youtube banner happened mid-2009, web developers around the world had soured on IE6 and actively trying to kill it off since 2005~2006. What the youtube banner provided was a way to finally get the word out, and an argument to give PHBs: it became much easier to sell browser upgrades (or not supporting IE6 anymore) when you could point to Youtube / Google and go "these folks have put their foot down".
- thruflo22 7y ago
  I’m not sure of the relative timing but the Google policy of “we support the last two major releases of the main browsers” also really helped. As a web developer at the time, I could put that in my proposals, saying “it’s the standard Google browser support policy”. At which point clients signed off on not needing legacy browser support.
- bluedino 7y ago
  I was stuck suppporting our biggest customer who ran IE6 until like...2013? Bleh.
lewiscollard 7y ago
I'm glad you've actually measured this, because you've saved me from doing it! Killing off our "update your browser" nag on our sites has been something I've been considering for a while. Over the last week we hit the jackpot at work, in that we had errors come into Rollbar caused by every version of Internet Explorer we don't support all the way back to 6. Yes, there was a little celebration in our dev team when we scored our first IE6 exception. :)
- tracker1 7y ago
  Current apps I'm working on test for async function support (ES2017) and if the browser doesn't support it redirects to `/legacy.html` ... it's not public facing but that was the break point for supporting the application properly... anything newer is polyfilled with babel.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
homero 7y ago
IE6 was insanely bad. Later browsers worked somewhat.
- tracker1 7y ago
  IE6 was pretty awesome when it was released... not having to support IE4.x and NN4.x when it hit sufficient market share was really nice. Eventually it became the next boat anchor. IE10-11 is the current boat anchor, and will probably cycle out within the next year. Already have internal apps with no IE support at all, and only the most recent Edge release. The perspective on outdated (insecure) browsers is becoming more broadly accepted.
  - tty2300 7y ago
    Our enterprise app (not internal) has 80% of users on IE11 :/
    - tracker1 7y ago
      I'd suggest that comes down to the type of client/users you have... it's definitely not a common case. I'd also be willing to guess that most of those users also have a different browser installed. IE11 is pretty capable, but requires a lot of shims/shivs for modern code transpilation.
      - tty2300 7y ago
        The customers have weird IE security tools/firewalls and are not allowed to use anything else. For some reason they think that IE with very expensive tools to lock it down is more secure than a modern browser.
    - tjalfi 7y ago
      Did older versions of your app require IE? If so, their admins may have added your site to Enterprise Mode[0] so that it opens with IE. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-to-improve-compatibility https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-...
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> They just clicked through the pop-up, presumably without reading it. That's what you train users to do when you show them intrusive popups that aren't actually important.

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.
kbenson 7y ago
I think it likely did. When CEO's and upper management read stories about how doing away with IE6 is better for security, and then remember they use IE6 for certain things internally, that can spur conversations that cause change. Maybe not immediate change, and maybe it has to percolate through company boundaries where enterprises express their dissatisfaction with the tooling provided them if it requires usage of tools widely believed to be insecure and change finally starts happening. Ultimately, I think top-down change at enterprises is much faster than bottom up, and a national news story is just the sort of thing to spur a lot of top-down changes.
c0nfused 7y ago
How many employees lied to their boss or IT staff about needing ie7 to watch you tube harder. My guess from my time in the trenches is about 1 in 5.
eadmund 7y ago
I think it gave people permission to think of IE6 as outdated. It's far easier for a decisionmaker to follow the herd rather than get out in front of him ('nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM/whatever'): convince him that the herd has turned on IE and he'll gladly pitch in.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  Whelp, and in this case, nobody got fired, either. Good point!
reaperducer 7y ago
There's no way this banner did anything in reality. Corporations didn't upgrade because of their tooling, not youtube. Don't underestimate the power of employees to influence employers. iPhones didn't end up all over the enterprise space because Blackberry walked away from the market.
chocolatebunny 7y ago
From my personal experience corporations didn't officially ditch IE6 until they officially ditched Windows XP. Microsoft dropping support for Windows XP encouraged corporations with expensive support contracts to upgrade their fleet. This resulted in new hardware, new os, and new default browser.
cpeterso 7y ago
StatCounter's graph of browser version market share for 2009 doesn't show the same sharp IE6 drop as the YouTube graph. IE6 users probably just switched another browser when they wanted to watch YouTube. IE6 and IE7 were already on their way out, being replaced by IE8 and Chrome. http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-partially-combined-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-201001 http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-partially-combined...

shawabawa3 7y ago

> I wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement? I think this is the answer. Most people at the time weren't on IE6 out of choice. The fact that youtube (or more likely google docs) had this banner, gave disgruntled employees a better excuse to force IT to upgrade than "I don't like this browser"

fgonzag 7y ago
It might have even gotten IT the budget to upgrade, too. I bet it was pretty hard for IT to ask for many millions of dollars to upgrade in-house apps to be cross-browser compatible when there was no urgent need. A banner on every exec's page makes it easier.
toastking 7y ago
The web was also a bit of a different place back then. I think there were people who were "power users" who used Firefox and Chrome and others who used IE because it was bundled with their browser.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

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

tracker1 7y ago
The OS upgrade is/was free, and IE11 is nearly 6 years old at this point. There are also other/current browsers available for Windows 7. There's really no excuse to not have a current browser.
- chris_wot 7y ago
  Notice he said that ADP uses Flash? ADP has always been awful, I only wish they would get taken out by a competitor.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    I don't even think it's possible to run Flash on a Mac currently.
    - snuxoll 7y ago
      Safari still runs Flash, and it can be enabled per-site in Chrome. Thank god, because we just switched to ADP and then there’s VMWare....
    - jamiek88 7y ago
      Easiest via chrome. But it’s been years since I’ve needed it.
      - chris_wot 7y ago
        No, it's not easy. I have a Flash based app I can't get out of using. Every day. Every day I have to tell Chrome to allow the app to run Flash. When I close the browser and reopen it, I need to tell tell Flash to "always" use Flash. Chrome's definition of "always" is very different to everyone else's. And that's on purpose. But I have no say in what corporate app I can use, and I have no way of getting it migrated quickly. The Chrome devs seem actively hostile to the poor slob who must us the corporate app and have no way of migrating away from it.

masklinn 7y ago

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

thruflo22 7y ago
I’m not sure of the relative timing but the Google policy of “we support the last two major releases of the main browsers” also really helped. As a web developer at the time, I could put that in my proposals, saying “it’s the standard Google browser support policy”. At which point clients signed off on not needing legacy browser support.
bluedino 7y ago
I was stuck suppporting our biggest customer who ran IE6 until like...2013? Bleh.

lewiscollard 7y ago

I'm glad you've actually measured this, because you've saved me from doing it! Killing off our "update your browser" nag on our sites has been something I've been considering for a while. Over the last week we hit the jackpot at work, in that we had errors come into Rollbar caused by every version of Internet Explorer we don't support all the way back to 6. Yes, there was a little celebration in our dev team when we scored our first IE6 exception. :)

tracker1 7y ago
Current apps I'm working on test for async function support (ES2017) and if the browser doesn't support it redirects to `/legacy.html` ... it's not public facing but that was the break point for supporting the application properly... anything newer is polyfilled with babel.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

homero 7y ago

IE6 was insanely bad. Later browsers worked somewhat.

tracker1 7y ago
IE6 was pretty awesome when it was released... not having to support IE4.x and NN4.x when it hit sufficient market share was really nice. Eventually it became the next boat anchor. IE10-11 is the current boat anchor, and will probably cycle out within the next year. Already have internal apps with no IE support at all, and only the most recent Edge release. The perspective on outdated (insecure) browsers is becoming more broadly accepted.
- tty2300 7y ago
  Our enterprise app (not internal) has 80% of users on IE11 :/
  - tracker1 7y ago
    I'd suggest that comes down to the type of client/users you have... it's definitely not a common case. I'd also be willing to guess that most of those users also have a different browser installed. IE11 is pretty capable, but requires a lot of shims/shivs for modern code transpilation.
    - tty2300 7y ago
      The customers have weird IE security tools/firewalls and are not allowed to use anything else. For some reason they think that IE with very expensive tools to lock it down is more secure than a modern browser.
  - tjalfi 7y ago
    Did older versions of your app require IE? If so, their admins may have added your site to Enterprise Mode[0] so that it opens with IE. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-to-improve-compatibility https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-...

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

> They just clicked through the pop-up, presumably without reading it. That's what you train users to do when you show them intrusive popups that aren't actually important.