YouTube Phasing Out Support For IE6

Oracle Goddess sends word that YouTube is presenting IE6 users with a banner exhorting them to upgrade to a modern browser, and TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube will be phasing out support for IE6 soon. This Twitter search reflects the jubilation breaking out all over the Net at the imminent demise of this most despised and non-standards-compliant browser. The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.

Comments

Still mandatory where I work

[ArhcAngel]

I know quite a few LARGE corporate environments that won't be upgrading any time soon since IE7/8 "breaks" their intranet web apps and they aren't about to budget for updating apps that work on the existing browser.

no need of restrictions then

[mehrotra.akash]

if IE6 is not supported by youtube, and many other popular, non work related sites follow suit, wouldnt enterprises prefer to keep IE6 as it would automatically prevent employees from accessing video/social networking sites from work, and additional money would not have to be spent on proxies and other content restriction system??

since their own apps are in house they can keep IE6 forever w/o any problems

Re:no need of restrictions then

[SydShamino]

Yeah, the IT team can just rename the IE6 icon as "ERP Interface" or something, and install Firefox, naming its icon "Web Browser".

Voila, internal apps keep working but employees are no longer at risk due to IE6 use on the wild wild internet.

Even better if as a company they block IE6 access to external sites, so people who try to use their ERP software to browse the web would be cut off and told to launch Firefox.

Re:Market share

[Skylinux]

Might be SPAM bots, they fake user-agents all the time and try to either hide as a major search engine or as a user.

I am currently working on a question/answer based CAPTCHA system + bot trap and monitor the user agents triggering my bot trap.
So far,
59 falsely claimed to be Googlebot
The rest claim to be some version of IE

Don't rely on anything for user-agents, I am identifying myself as Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html) right now to get around websites offering unlocked content to Google but require registrations from normal users.

BRAVO. Earns my respect double on this...

[CFD339]

First, actions like this from massively broad based sites are critical to finally wiping the scourge of IE6 development off the planet. So initial Kudos to YouTube for taking the step.

Of course, YouTube == Google; so no shock that they're willing to disparage IE6, right?

But here's the difference between Google and Microsoft --

The banner shown here, on YouTube (owned by Google) doesn't JUST list Chrome as the upgrade path. It clearly gives equal exposure to Chrome, Firefox, and IE8 -- the biggest competing product to its own browser.

That's the right way to do be competitive in a social networking context. I think we know that if this was say, Bing! or Hotmail, it would show a link to IE8 but that's it. Well, ok, we don't KNOW that, but most of us assume it. I certainly do.

Re:Market share

[DNS-and-BIND]

And pirated copies of Windows XP, which is what Asia uses exclusively. I remember showing one fellow Firefox, he was flabbergasted that something could replace IE. It had never entered his brain that anyone could use anything other than IE6 that came with the system.