The bittersweet consequence of YouTube’s incredible growth is that so many stories will be lost underneath all of the layers of new paint. This is why I wanted to tell the story of how, ten years ago, a small team of web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube and got away with it.
I doubt many of us will shed a tear for Internet Explorer 6, but this story does illustrate just how much power and influence large technology companies really have. Google has repeatedly been caught using similar tactics to derail Firefox, and tactics like this will only grow more popular the more they see they can get away with it.
Great story. From security POV, IE6 was a menace that deserved to be reduced and it doesn’t help that it was also a pain to support. Good riddance.
IE6 was actually a rather decent design. I prefered netscape back in the day, but IE had some advantages. Mainly fast start times (as it was part of the shell, try starting IE in litestep on windows 98, it is slower than starting netscape). That is also the main disadvantage, it HAS to run with privileged mode on all systems prior to vista prior to IE7. Also the allowance of activex controls without signing is a HUUUUUGE security error, at the end of IE6 anyone coulr make a fake activex control and just fudge your system in any way they liked.
Vista solved these problems ten years ago. And IE7 is available to all XP and 2k users still using it for nostalgia purposes, so much of what google wanted gone IS indeed gone.
After IE6 was updated to 7 the main attack vector for the browser was flash, and thanfully that is dead as well,.
The beauty of this story is how they didn’t use technical nastiness at all, they just put up an empty threat, a fake warning – a purely visual invitation to change browsers, born out of developer’s fatigue with IE6. This is the opposite of what we fear happens today: officially everything is compatible but the user experience says otherwise.