back to article YouTube's IE6 support dies on March 13

Google will remove IE6-support from YouTube on March 13, according to a web post from the company. In a post to the YouTube help pages, the Mountain View Chocolate Factory indicates that when visiting YouTube, netizens using an "old web browser" are now seeing an interstitial warning that they will soon have to upgrade if they …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Brilliant

    Now we just need everyone to follow, and our lives will be easier.

  2. spegru
    Pint

    nicely timed

    just after the MSFT browser ballot screen is due to appear - on all version of windows incl (to my surprise according to the MSFT blog posting) XP!

  3. Petrea Mitchell
    Alert

    Google's ballot screen

    It's the browser ballot screen again, except I'm guessing Chrome is always listed first and IE is always the furthest to the right.

    I also figure most people will look long enough for the familiar IE icon to catch their eye, but it takes only a small fraction clicking on Chrome instead for "The YouTube upgrade broke my Internet" to be the IT headache of the next few weeks.

    Should be interesting to see how much this changes Chrome's share over the next while...

    1. DJV Silver badge

      Nope, you guessed wrong

      I just tried it using IE6* and the order is random.

      *via Win2000 on Virtual Box - I am a web developer so I have to keep that pile of crap around in order to test sites on it - but hopefully not for much longer!

  4. Rogers
    Badgers

    Death to IE6

    http://deathtoie6.com/ - go on, you know you want to, all you webmasters out there.

    1. DJV Silver badge

      Yes, definitely!

      With one caveat...

      ...the deathtoie6.com site goes to abetterbrowser.org in order to recommend a new browser but that site ought to check to see if the user is running a Windows OS that predates XP before recommending IE8! I tried it using Win2000 and it still recommended IE8 (ok, not as much as it recommends the "proper" browsers). Mind you, the Microsoft IE8 page doesn't check either... but what else would you expect from their crappy coders!!

  5. Pirate Dave Silver badge
    Pirate

    There are

    "features" on YouTube besides watching videos? Oh, I guess they mean voting and subscribing. No great loss then...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    People who work in UK gov departments...

    ...aren't allowed on YouTube anyway. This changes precisely nothing...

    1. James Hughes 1

      You sure?

      All those IE6 installs in companies are protected by firewalls/virus systems. Those outside the corporates often not. Getting a load of unprotected PC's to use up to date browsers may well help overall net security.

  7. OFI

    Meh?

    Not a great loss. Most IE6 users will be from large businesses who probably have little use for Youtube anyway..

    Besides, like Google, it will still work just new features might break.

    1. Nic 3

      Large corps watch vid too

      On Youtube and other streaming sites. Interaction is often key such as comments / updates which all have to work without a traditional form post or refresh.

  8. gollux
    Grenade

    Good riddance...

    The time has long expired for this web design eyesore to leave. The inability of either 5 or 6 to do basic math calculations has caused many a web designer grief.

  9. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

    Translation

    "As the Web evolves, our goal is to keep up by making YouTube a richer, faster, and more dynamic experience for everyone."

    =

    More flash ads and popup ads in videos followed by needing to download 100 meg of data just to watch 10 seconds of cheap camera phone video of someone's cat puking up a furball.

    Ok wheres the evil google icon ?

  10. Steve Roper
    Thumb Up

    Vindicated

    Our web dev company stopped supporting IE 6 a year ago, at my vociferous and protracted insistence. Moving to W3C-only development has nearly HALVED our development costs and time-to-deployment in the year to date, for which the CEO is profoundly grateful. He took some persuading, though, and even recently he's been asking whether or not we should look more closely at how many IE 6 visitors our sites are getting. This news will vindicate me and convince him that we've made the right move.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      ...so how many

      IE6 visitors are your sites getting? And if it's a lot more than you expected (i.e. a number worth caring about), have you told the CEO?

      1. Steve Roper

        Re: so how many

        That varies from site to site. The most visits from IE 6 users we've had since going to W3C-only development was on our main retail site last August, with 1287 unique visits in the month out of 23,443 total, which makes it about 5% of traffic. To me, that's 5% that's a small loss, but my CEO would see that as 1287 lost customers, so while it's not a number worth caring about, I haven't exactly bragged about it to the boss! :)

  11. Old Marcus

    Bout time

    And yes, Google Chrome is always going to be on the left, since any fule no that youtube is run by...

    The UK Government.

    Ha, you have all been fooled by the massive conspiracy. Now go forth and blog!

    (Silly, but had to be done.)

  12. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Happy

    Wot. Civil Servants cant access Youtube?

    If only their other *main* applications followed suite.

  13. TeeCee Gold badge
    Flame

    I don't believe this shit!

    Years of good, solid recommendations by qualified people to move away from IE6 and fuck-all result.

    One "Google pwned by naughty Chinese hax0rs" story in the press however.

    I don't know why we fucking bother. Nobody's listening to us, IT policy is actually decided by some fat git with column inches to fill on a slow news day in Fleet Street.

    1. Thomas 18
      Unhappy

      yeah

      Isn't that the case with everything? its all about PR and the bottom line.

  14. Jess

    What about ....

    ... Websites serving a simple w3c valid site with no javascript (similar to facebook lite, but valid) to all unsupported browsers and those with javascript disabled?

    When dropped, IE 6 could just be removed from the supported list.

    1. Richard 22
      Thumb Down

      supported browsers

      It's a really bad idea for the server to only serve a cut-down page by default to certain browsers. There's many more browsers out there than just the standard 5 (moblie browsers for example). Excluding browsers which could render the content perfectly well simply because you haven't got the time, resources etc to verify the sites work well on them is only going to alienate users.

      The most which should be done is to warn the user they're using an unsupported browser if you think there's a reason why this might be useful information for them (and having an alternative site available for them to use at their choice is even better) - yahoo does this quite well with it's mail web app, although it is annoying in that it doesn't remember your choice (yes, my netbook is running linux with a non-standard resolution, but it renders yahoo mail perfectly well thank you...)

      1. Jess

        Ok a more refined version.

        Known supported browsers get the full site.

        Known unsupported browsers and those with no javascript get the "lite" site.

        Unknown browsers get the lite site with an extra option to try the full site with a warning.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Would never work for one reason: Cheap clientss

      That's fair enough, but most companies who hire web designers are cheap asses who wouldn't fork out the extra for dough for a companion website let alone the proper amount for their primary site.

      It's the very same reason that companies who buy 100% flash websites don't tend to have a HTML alternative unless of course they are swimming in the big bucks.

      IE makes the internet UGLY and it's got nothing to do with flash and JS, something as simple as using tranparency in web design or certain CSS techniques becomes a complete pain in the proverbial balls.

  15. Tippis
    Flame

    Kill it with fire.

    …and then douse the ashes with chlorine trifluoride and burn them as well. It's a better funeral than IE6 deserves.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Damn! There for a minute I thought there was something to cheer about!

    Then they went and ruined it by continuing to support it for viewing videos.

  17. Dave K
    Go

    Random order

    Just to note that the order seems to be random. Just tested it quickly on IE6 (new PC at work before WSUS upps it to IE8) and the list went Opera, Safari, Firefox, IE8, Google Chrome this time around.

  18. Patrick O'Reilly
    Thumb Up

    Opera Love

    I'm surprised that Yoogle included Opera in their list of favored browsers as they still don't fully support it for Wave, Gmail (officially), docs etc .

  19. Scott A. Brown
    Thumb Down

    Unfortunately for me...

    ...I'm the sole web designer at my place and our site gets 16-17% of total visitors using IE6. The user comes first so I'd best carry on supporting it.

    Instead of creating a snazzy site I make them relatively simple and drop in little 'presents' to those who use good browsers afterwards such as transparencies, shadows etc.

    The amount of web designers who blindly bitch about IE6 - and stop supporting it - without considering their users is starting to worry me.

  20. Rabbers
    FAIL

    Surely

    Allowing IE6 users to continue to play YouTube video is an enormous cop-out

    Given that the entire site's audience goes there to watch video, Google's banner should say "Yep! we're gonna continue to support you IE6 guys, relax! Oooh look at these 5 lovely icons, I wouldn't pay much attention to those!"

  21. jon 77

    So does FF & opera support...

    Tell me this aint true.... They will be going HTML5 only from march 13 - FF still does not have this yet...

  22. Annihilator
    FAIL

    Support dies...

    ...but videos continue to be served to IE6 clients. Erm... where's the incentive??

  23. jon 77

    actually, Youtube may lose out!!!

    If only youtube uses HTML5 exclusively, then a LOT of other video sites will be very happy, as they will get all the 'disgruntled' EX-youtube custom!!!!! :) :)

    so watch out google, your scheme to maximize use of chrome may fail... there are a LOT of people out there with old & cheap PC's mainly due to lack of money!!!

  24. jon 77

    firefox fans are not happy!

    http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=4f151a4546840ad5&hl=en

    quote:

    "Firefox supports html5 video tag just fine. Just not the patent encumbered codec google uses which seems to be a poor choice. Is google going to fix this and support firefox's unencumbered choice of codecs? "

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