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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.'"
No. If it's an old version, chances are that the creators themselves aren't actively supporting or updating it anymore. If that's the case, why should everyone else continue to support it at their expense?
Besides, no one would actually miss Bing. :P
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
If IE6 weren't from Microsoft, but still had the same endemic big security problems, being actively exploited from everywhere, not interest in fixes from the making company and being used still by 10-20% of internet, specially in the corporate world, probably Google would phase out the support anyway.
Regarding Microsoft/Bing, Firefox never had so big holes, and so actively exploited, like IE6. And anyway old versions have very low usage, and odds are high that that users dont visit bing (most of its niceties are based on silverlight, they are excluding browsers/OS already)
Also matter how much used is an old, insecure version, compared with another "players" of internet, like other browsers versions, or even old flash player versions. Only in IE the old, insecure and unmaintained version is widely used, in the others the most used versions are the latest or close enough, and without very big vulnerabilities anyway (ok, maybe with the exception of flash)
Even Microsoft want people to move away from IE6. Of course, they want them to move to IE7/8 which often means a Windows OS upgrade, but in either case I don't think they'll be too concerned by this (as far as I know they plan to drop security patch updates in three years anyway, so even if all the existing IE6 users switch to FF/Opera/Chrome/Safari, etc it will still be a good move in MS' view since they won't be hit with the negative publicity when they do stop patching exploits.
What if Microsoft was to phase out support on Bing for an old version of Firefox.
That wouldn't be monopoly abuse. Firefox 3 is distributed for free as free software, and it runs even on Windows 2000 that can't run IE 7 or 8.
IE6 == web browser // Major problem // No problem
IE6 != web browser AND IE6 == Corporate network app viewer
Just use Firefox or Chrome + IETab. I don't get it why those big corporations don't understand this.