Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
And everyone lets out a collective exhale "Finally".
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 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.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
The thing about supporting obsolete technology forever is that the people who want the support will always want the support forever. Sometimes, you just have to cut them loose because that is the only way to get them to move to something better. And once they are on something better they'll wonder how they got along without it - with the cycle repeating. Of course some of their outdated applications will need to be updated but really does it always have to get to the point where you insist you need "Windows 95" forever?
Shh.
As long as html5 is patent-free, ok. Otherwise it is clearly unacceptable.
I doubt anyone would be able to form a convincing argument that Google dropping support for a decade-old browser is any form of abuse of monopoly. They aren't forcing people to upgrade to _their_ browser - just a newer browser. IE7 or IE8 is fine with them.
Seriously, IE6 is a decade old. In internet years, that's about four or five generations old. It's time to drag corporations* into the modern age, even if they're kicking and screaming the entire way.
*After all, we know it's only corporations that still use IE6 because nobody in their right mind _chooses_ to remain with IE6 on their personal computers.
It should be noted that Google is not breaking youtube for IE6 users(the poor bastards). Doing so would be pretty stupid, especially since most of the heavy lifting goes on inside the flash blob, and people slacking at work are probably a decent sized audience.
They are just declaring their intention to no longer subject new features to the "can it be made to work with IE6?" test.
The problem is merely one of semantics.
IE6 == web browser // Major problem // No problem
IE6 != web browser AND IE6 == Corporate network app viewer
Given that, with the version of Outlook Web Access that shipped with Exchange 2007, all browsers other than IE6+(including most recent versions of Firefox and Safari) are forced to use "Outlook Web Access Light", while IE has access to "Outlook Web Access Premium", I'm going to assume that MS is willing to risk it.
From a market perspective, they would be morons to lock out any potential customers; but you'd probably have to prove pretty deliberate malfeasance in order to get anything legally actionable, particularly if it involves support for browsers that aren't supported by their own producers anymore...
Of which these sites are also registered:
If I was a proactive sort of person, I would register *ie8*.com from your list, because the day will come where history will repeat itself. Maybe register *ie9*.com too, if you want to be really forward planning.
It's time to drag corporations* into the modern age, even if they're kicking and screaming the entire way.
It's just that the users will be the one that will be kicking and screaming. One of my colleagues was unable to play videos from YouTube, was frustrated, but assumed that there's no way of doing that. She didn't notice the (a) continue to video link, (b) upgrade to one of these comment. Someone should upgrade the users first. :D
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
YouTube is increasingly becoming an important tool, especially in marketing and training. For example, search for "PMP Certification", "ITIL", "iso 9000" on YouTube. Not to mention any number of technical skill areas.
It's time to drag corporations* into the modern age, even if they're kicking and screaming the entire way.
Actually, this will most likely not have ANY affect on Corporate use of IE6, as most Corporation Masters hate things like YouTube as Time wasters. So it is with great glee that they will continue to demand using IE 6 for as long as they can.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
RTFA
Google IS dumping older versions of Firefox as well.
Something of a non-sequiteur, as the H.264 CODEC is not part of, nor mandated by, the HTML5 spec.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, they're usually a "black box" you throw data at and get back video. See Wikipedia
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Mozilla may be the first to tell you to upgrade to a current version.
Nobody would even notice. Does ANYBODY actually use Bing?
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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
No simple answer. Some stuff basically takes the full compressed video into the hardware, and then you trust it when it says that video is being output. You may not even have direct CPU access to the frame buffer with the resulting uncompressed frames of video. Other stuff gives uncompressed frames back to the CPU. Other stuff accelerates some of the steps.
AIUI, my n900 has a DSP on the SOC which is used for MPEG4 stuff, but could just as well be used to accelerate other codecs. It also has an OpenGL 2 ES GPU, which has support for pixel shaders. One can imagine a future firmware revision on a device like an n900 with full support for OpenCL on the GPU being able to use that to accelerate fairly arbitrary codecs in "semi-hardware." A more hardcore GPGPU guy than myself could probably accomplish quite a lot just using the pixel shader functionality to dump intermediate steps into a FBO.
Given how common pixel shader capable GPU hardware is becoming in the mobile space, I fully expect that we'll see OpenCL become very common for GPGPU stuff in handheld devices for DSP-like things. It'll take a little while, but eventually the wheel of reinvention will reduce video codecs back to software and it will become a moot point.
Like HTML 1-4 then. They don't specify formats for images, for example. PNG, GIF, and JPEG are all outside of the HTML spec.
There is such a thing as scope, when it comes to specs. Some things do not belong in a spec.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
>>>will simply see a screen telling them they need to upgrade.
Why do that? Why not just simply treat IE6 users the same way you treat IE5 or IE4 users (give them the webpage, but it may not render properly).
Maybe they have a good reason for not upgrading (like owning a PowerMac or other old computer that won't anything but IE5 or IE6).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall