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

Finally

[Dyinobal]

And everyone lets out a collective exhale "Finally".

Re:Finally

[pedestrian crossing]

RIP IE6

Burn in HELL, IE6!!

Re:Finally

[Hadlock]

Finally, but in replacement, Youtube is likely upgrading to their new "beta" interface they've been testing for quite some time, which has (IMO) really poor functionality, and looks like the Hulu.com's interface designer's scrappy younger brother designed (which is totally unusable, btw). No wonder they're dropping IE6 support; the new interface is such shit IE6 probably can't handle it.

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".

Re:Next up, IE7

[BenoitRen]

pixel perfect layout

If you want to be standards compliant, you'll throw away the outdated notion of a pixel-perfect lay-out. It's all about flexible lay-outs.

Re:Next up, IE7

[KlomDark]

Amen brother! Now if we could just get rid of all the sucky "web designers" with their pre-historic web concepts.

"Here's a cool picture of a web page I made with Dreamweaver, now you have to make it work for real, and don't take to long and it has to look exactly like my picture." - I got so sick of that crap. Little newb idiots that don't get the concept of liquid layout and insist on "pixel perfect".

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.

Hooray!

[headkase]

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?

Re:Hooray!

[BenoitRen]

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?

Yes. It's still very usable, and upgrading your computer to something that'll run slower and not make you more productive is dumb.

Re:One has to wonder

[whisper_jeff]

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.

Important Clarification:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:One has to wonder

[nagnamer]

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

Google IS dumping older versions of FF

[argent]

RTFA

Google IS dumping older versions of Firefox as well.

Re:One has to wonder

[BrokenHalo]

Mozilla may be the first to tell you to upgrade to a current version.

Nobody would even notice. Does ANYBODY actually use Bing?

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.