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YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye
- pchristensen 17y agoThis is the kind of big player that will cause people to upgrade. It's the old saying that if people want dancing bunnies, people will click on anything put in front of them to get those dancing bunnies. Other apps will still have to support IE6 though, b/c BigCo's IT Department will be happy to stick with the browser that prevents employees from watching YouTube.
- Ardit20 17y agoMaybe IT Departments would notice if google.com did the same thing aswell. Would that be monopolistic however?
- ErrantX 17y agoProbably. Which is where it gets murky because that might not be a bad thing. (though they dont have a legit reason for blocking it - there is nothing IE6 doesnt "support" the G search needs)
- theklub 17y agoThey would lose search market to bing in that case.
- electromagnetic 17y agoNot necessarily, I finally dumped my hotmail account when it told me it doesn't support Chrome. I believe brand familiarity would carry a lot of people into using a different browser. Google did huge things by implementing the Firefox download links. If you go to google.com and you get prompted "Runs best with Chrome" and you get a slightly delayed service, people will switch. If they slowed the service down until its still faster than MSN, Ask and Yahoo, but slower than google's supposed to be, you'd be able to force many people over to the browser of your choosing for speed. Also Bing doesn't work particularly well. It also complains at me because I'm using Chrome.
- sosuke 17y agoNot to suggest that people are evangelical about using IE6 but wouldn't your example make the case that users would rather switch services than change browsers? Anything to reduce IE6 usage is good news to web developers though.
- andreyf 17y agoI finally dumped my hotmail account when it told me it doesn't support Chrome. So you chose to switch e-mail providers rather than browsers. The parent is saying the same holds true for search engines, which have a lot smaller barriers to switching services.
- mcav 17y agoIt'd probably be monopolistic if they blocked IE8, and maybe IE7. But I think IE6 is legitimately old enough, with enough known problems, that it would be justifiable if it ever came up in court.
- marcog1 17y agoIt' doesn't take much for Google's web search to support an outdated browser since it uses minimal javascript, so Google will only lose out by blocking IE6.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- chaqke 17y agoI wonder if facebook was paid by adobe when facebook videos began requiring Flash 10. That's the only reason I upgraded flash.
- taitems 17y agoHaving developed Flash plugins and applications in the past, you need at least Flash player 9+ to do anything remotely powerful.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- vaksel 17y agothe revolution has begun
- statictype 17y agoThis is great. It's going to take big and popular sites like Youtube and Facebook to finally kill of IE6.
- Xichekolas 17y agoExcept most IE6 installs are in corporate environments, which most likely already block youtube and facebook, so it won't really change anything. Now if we could get Sun, IBM, and Google to all swear off IE6, maybe some IT departments would grudgingly update to IE7.
- beza1e1 17y agoI believe it's a myth that "most" IE6 are corporate environments. The diagrams about IE6 work day-weekend fluctuation wasn't that big. I expect at least half of the active IE6 users to be users of the category "installed Win XP and doesn't care about updates or browsers". At least I know some people like this.
- jonknee 17y agoCorporate laptops make no distinction of work days. Digg's recent survey shows that a most of their users who are on IE 6 are so because of work. http://blog.digg.com/?p=878 http://blog.digg.com/?p=878 There are also a lot of bots that label themselves as IE 6 which inflates the effect.
- JshWright 17y agoDigg's recent survey shows that a most of their users who are on IE 6 _[and are interested in completing a survey about what browser they use]_ are so because of work. If someone is already in the aforementioned "installed Win XP and doesn't care about updates or browsers" category, I think it's pretty safe to assume they might be in the "doesn't want to be bother with a survey about their browser" category.
- joshfinnie 17y ago
- pilif 17y agoThis is actually a change welcome by most IE6 users. Well. Not by their users, but by their administrators. We now know that most people still on IE6 are on IE6 because they are forced by corporate policy, corporate policy that most likely forbids You Tube use if there are no filters in place that make consumption impossible in the first place. If you want to provide a web service to the corporate internet, you are still stuck with the crap that is IE6 (customers of a customer of ours was still using IE 5.5 (on NT4 in the year 2008 - sigh) it took some real convincing to make them accept the fact that the user experience could be degraded).
- danw 17y agoI've noticed a few corporates who still need IE6 for some internal web apps also installing firefox recently due to not being able to have two versions of IE installed.
- jpcx01 17y agoI always figured the absolute best way to support old IE6 developed intranet apps would be a single site browser tool with embedded IE6. Like fluid for windows. The problem is Microsofts boneheaded decision to make IE systemwide. Upgrading to IE7 also upgrades all webcontrol instances. So this doesn't seem feasable.
- onreact-com 17y agoThe best thing about IE6 is that you can crash it with ease by adding a few bytes of CSS code on your website.
- billybob 17y agoI think I speak for web developers everywhere when I say: DIE, IE6, DIE! DIE DIE DIE!!!!!!
- billybob 17y agoI have a dream... of a world where everyone upgrades their browser in a timely way... where security fixes get applied and botnets don't spread... where the millions of developer hours formerly spent on browser hacks are instead used to add features... where advanced CSS selectors can be safely used... I have a dream of a world where one day, rounded corners can be made with a simple declaration and work in all browsers... where proprietary plugins are not needed for video, and tiny vector graphics scale beautifully on the page... where browsers will be judged by the usefulness of their features, not by the OSes they were bundled with..
- quellhorst 17y agoYour imaginary place starts out sounding like a Mac User's world then drifts off into Lake Wobegon territory.
- Klonoar 17y agoI love how this news is at least a week or so old. Nice job, Techcrunch.
- calambrac 17y agoNo Safari link? Given that Chrome is WebKit, you'd think they'd throw a little love back.
- pbz 17y agoSafari is pointless on Windows.
- calambrac 17y agoIt's an alternate browser that supports modern web standards. How is it any more 'pointless' than Firefox or Chrome?
- snprbob86 17y agoIt basically only exists for the sake of testing without buying a Mac. Since it pulls in an entire Cocoa/Carbon/whatever stack, it uses an intense amount of ram and performs slowly.
- calambrac 17y agoI'm not on Windows, so I haven't used it myself, but you're the first person I've heard complain about it since 4.0 dropped (though, granted, I don't listen very hard). More important, I would think, is that it supports the web standards that Google has a vested interest in seeing flourish, and it would be another shiny logo that might get clicked rather than the IE7/8 link they put up out of necessity.
- snprbob86 17y agoI use Safari on my Macbook and have it installed on my windows machine for testing. - IE8 is there because it is a clear upgrade path - FireFox is there because it has well known brand recognition - Chrome is there because they want to push their own tech What would Safari there gain? It would simply be one more choice. I think the three are already too many.
- jgilliam 17y agoThis seems like a move by Google to push faster adoption of HTML 5.
- barredo 17y agoIE7 & 8 do not support HTML 5 either
- SecurityMatters 17y agoThat is a good start. Now, if they will disallow IE7 and IE8, we can get IE users back to a version that does not use ActiveX for plugins. That would be a great security step.
- lucifer 17y agoGoodbye or not, I can't believe anyone would kiss IE6.
- jasonkester 17y agoIt just occurred to me that Blogabond (one of my sites) will be pretty much the LAST site on the internet to drop IE6 support. It's a travel blog host, which means that it will always have users hitting it from a public machine in rural Laos. Having used that machine, which runs Windows 95 and shares an AOL Free Trial dialup connection with 5 of its brethren in an open-air hut on generator power, I can state with confidence that it is not scheduled for an upgrade any time soon. You make your bed, you lie in it I guess.