A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

Ironically, YouTube is now forced to support a browser that has terrible standards support, entirely of their own making: Cobalt[1].

YouTube on TVs is actually a web app that loads into a stripped down, custom webview. The YouTube team doesn't have the resources to implement many web APIs, so they implemented just what they needed.

The problem is that they can't reliably update Cobalt versions on TVs, they can't ask users to update, and they can't just break older TVs in the wild. So the YouTube on TV frontend (not YouTube TV the service) has to only use APIs they shipped like 10 years ago.

And because it takes so long for an old Cobalt version to go out of support, they don't invest in implementing new features because they wouldn't be usable anytime soon. 10 years ago I was in a meeting with them where they said they couldn't implement something because they wouldn't be able to use it for 5 years... They still haven't implemented it.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt

From the depths of my heart: thank you. Whatever you did to kill it, I claim it was justified self-defense. I have my scars from the Browser Wars, and the string "IE6" fills me with loathing to this day.

For my own part, I made sure my employer had plans to remove IE6 from our support list the day Google officially did the same in March 2010. The very next day, I started adding code to our site that complied with official standards and worked perfectly on every other browser, and removing all the compatibility hacks we'd deployed to make that pig render a screen correctly. It was incredibly liberating.

I worked on the front end of Bing (then Live Search) back in 2007, and even within Microsoft, IE6 was hated and rallied against, at least by any team doing web development.

I remember that the former GM of the Internet Explorer 5 and 6 team transferred to my org about a year after I joined. In his intro email, he included a sheepish apology for IE6, which I printed and kept on my office wall for the rest of my time at Bing, it was a prized possession. Man that browser caused so many nightmares.

(to clarify, the GM was a good and smart guy, the apology was a little tongue-in-cheek since IE6 was arguably the best browser upon its release - the problem was Microsoft effectively abandoned it and let it languish and stagnate for years while the web moved on without it, which turned it and the IE org into well-deserved pariahs)

Netscape 4 was the bane of my existence, moreso than IE6 ever was, as an important client standardized internally on that forever so our entire platform had to be completely compatible with it. At least with IE you could do things in a user friendly way (perhaps at 2x the development and maintenance cost). Netscape 4 simply didn’t have the capability to do things we wanted to do experience-wise (like getting pushed content, I think?) without doing some extremely crazy and brittle workarounds at best (making it feel more like 5x the cost).

Also, IE4 was such a magnificent leap forward in the web that effectively enabled support for modern apps, which bought IE a ton of goodwill from me that didn’t wear off for a decade or so.

I've read this story before on a different site. I was near the start of my career in 2009. I honestly think they are overstating the effect of those banners.

The significant shift IMO was when Windows 7 machines replaced the ageing XP machines. That is what I saw in the google analytics on the sites I was supporting at the time.

I spent the first few years of my career wrestling with Internet Explorer 6 compatibility while working in a marketing studio that was Internet-first and pioneered concepts like responsive web development (the precursor to native mobile experiences/layouts).

Internet Explorer 6 was an incredible waste of resources. I developed primarily on a Mac OS system at the time, which was somewhat progressive in the industry, but in order to verify the functionality we had was working correctly on Internet Explorer 6 (which we still had observed was greater than 50% of the market share) I had to keep a PC on my desk just for IE6 testing.

There were a number of hacks that we could incorporate into additional override style sheets like conditional HTML comments that you could use to incorporate IE6 overrides or weird patterns that you could do by using asterisks that would allow you to target it specifically.

We didn't necessarily prioritize feature parity with IE6, but the site had to load and render correctly and support the cause of marketing the property that we were tasked to do. Once the adoption of it finally slowed, it was a great sigh of relief to the industry, and it made it feel like we could do anything we wanted to because we had been making concessions to it for so long.

A small group of people took a chance, and it turned into a movement and changed internet history. I bet this could become a solid documentary.

Related:

A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294406 - Feb 2024 (106 comments)

A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210439 - Nov 2023 (1 comment)

A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725293 - Oct 2021 (80 comments)

A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 at YouTube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655890 - Sept 2021 (2 comments)

A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 - May 2019 (363 comments)

I loved IE6 as as user when it came out, and grew to hate it as a developer when the browser standards moved on, but a stubborn, large-enough user base percentage had not. I blame slow-moving IT departments that refused to touch their internal environments when all the Web 2.0 progress made things new and scary. A product my team was in charge of had to support IE6 and IE7 years after the rest of the world moved on because the IT admins at Walgreens straight out refused to update the machines that the pharmacists used at their stores.

I'll go one step further, because the company I used to work at built browser extensions. Google built ChromeFrame (https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-get...) a tool that would allow IE to load chrome as an activex component and transparently replace the rendering engine of IE.

But building the software wasn't enough, they used some scammy browser toolbar company (one of our competitors) to deploy this software silently and without any user intervention, all of a sudden millions of users overnight switched to chrome. It was deployed as a proxy botnet and Google knew full well what was happening. I sent a note to the humans at Firefox because we had a top 10 extension at the time and were in the midst of porting it to Chrome. They called their contacts and sure enough our suspicions were correct.

Google would later go on to buy that company because they were pushing so much traffic to Google's ad partners (Ad Meld being another acquisition).

We got screwed and were never able to recover from the run-around. I became friends with the folks on the Chromium team and we talked about how google used a botnet to launch Chrome over beers in a SF dive bar.

Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Amazing read! One detail jumped out at me:

> Frustrated, one of the lawyers asked “Why did you have to put Chrome first?” Confused, I explained that we did not give any priority to Chrome. 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. As luck would have it, these two lawyers still used IE6 to access certain legacy systems and had both ended up with random seeds that placed Chrome in the first position. Their fear was that by showing preferential treatment to Chrome, we might prick the ears of European regulators already on the lookout for any anti-competitive behavior.

Wow those lawyers must've left the place many years ago huh!