YouTube To Kill IE6 Support On March 13

Joel writes "Over six months ago, Google announced it would start phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 on Orkut and YouTube, and started pushing its users to modern browsers. The search giant has now given a specific kill date for old browser support on the video website: 'Support stops on March 13th. Stopped support essentially means that some future features on YouTube will be rolled out that won't work in older browsers.'"

Comments

Next up, IE7

[sakdoctor]

IE7 is almost as much of an albatross as IE6 was.
CSS support is such, that if you want pixel perfect layout, you are looking at a seperate style sheet; and if you just serve the standards compliant sheet, your page will look like ass.

Update all "ie6 must die" campaigns, to "ie7 must die".

IE 6 Not dead in the workplace, doesn't matter

[wintercolby]

IE 6 will still be alive (and unfortunately not so well) in the corporate workplace all over the nation. In fact many companies are also breathing a sigh of relief along with us techies, but for different reasons. They don't want their users watching videos while they should be working. They are very likely happy that YouTube won't be supporting a browser that many of their critical one off, undersupported, buggy, POS (both versions of the acronym apply) IE 6 only apps do.

Re:Good Riddance!

[sakdoctor]

The problem is merely one of semantics.

IE6 == web browser // Major problem
IE6 != web browser AND IE6 == Corporate network app viewer // No problem

Re:Important Clarification:

[value_added]

It should be noted that Google is not breaking youtube for IE6 users(the poor bastards). Doing so would be pretty stupid ...

Correct on both counts. From the fine article:

YouTube will have an interstitial appear when users on older browser try to watch a video on YouTube. Google says the interstitial will show up indefinitely every two weeks until the user upgrades to the most recent version of their browser.

Implicit in the approach is an attempt to shame the user. That, combined with the presentation of a list of options (supported browsers) will go a long way to dispel the erroneous notions of folks who associate the internet with the Big Blue "e", or otherwise think the world begins and ends with Microsoft products. Overstated? Perhaps, but if I was Microsoft, I'd prefer not having one of the world's best known companies reminding my customers that my products suck.

IE8 sucks too.

[MikeFM]

For that matter IE8 sucks too. I wish Microsoft would just get it together and use webkit or gecko as their rendering engine. They could keep the familiar IE interface and whatever extras they wanted without forcing this load of crap on all us poor developers that just want standards support.