Ex-YouTube Developer Reveals How He 'Conspired To Kill IE6'

A former web developer at YouTube has revealed a tale about a clandestine operation to kill Internet Explorer 6 with a banner that went live in July 2009 warning IE6 users that YouTube would be phasing out support for Microsoft's browser -- even though no one at Google had endorsed such a plan. From a report: IE6 of course shipped as the default browser with Windows XP in 2001, six years before Chrome's first release in 2008. Google wouldn't officially drop support for IE6 until March 2010, but a group of renegade web developers at YouTube had already pulled off a campaign that coincided with a serious fall in IE6 usage worldwide, from about 25 percent in mid-2009 to less than 10 percent within a year. The campaign consisted of a web banner displayed to IE6 users on YouTube beginning in July 2009. The banner hadn't been officially endorsed by Google, which had acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65bn and by 2009 had begun integrating it into the Google infrastructure.

As former YouTube web developer Chris Zacharias details in a blog, the desire to kill off IE6 was that it had become 'the bane of our web development team's existence'. 'At least one to two weeks every major sprint cycle had to be dedicated to fixing new UI that was breaking in IE6. Despite this pain, we were told we had to continue supporting IE6 because our users might be unable to upgrade or might be working at companies that were locked in,' he explains.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.