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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#21

Post by kevan »

floatrock wrote: post #13

Was struggling with legacy IE6 support-hacks too once while building healthcare webapps. In that field, it was more because hospital IT admins lock everything down and upgrading stuff very much falls under the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra. We too got fed up with all the IE6-specific hacks we had to maintain. One day on the login page, we added a "IE6 might be a HIPAA violation, please upgrade your system"…

A bit more recently (I hope), PCI requirements helpfully forced our hand to stop supporting IE8.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#22

Post by archgoon »

behringer wrote: post #17

Wow is this ancient history already? At the time is was regarded as completely retarded because nobody used IE6 except grandmas and corporations. So youtube telling us to use IE6 was silly. On top of that, many websites took the popup and made it so you couldn't actually see their content under any circumstances. Those sites simply got ignored by literally everyone on a corporate browser. Largely it was a waste of ti…

> nobody used IE6 except grandmas and corporations.

And a fifth of YouTube users at the time.

"IE6 users represented around 18% of our user base at that point. We understood that we could not just drop support for it"

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#23

Post by behringer »

archgoon wrote: post #22
behringer wrote: post #17

Wow is this ancient history already? At the time is was regarded as completely retarded because nobody used IE6 except grandmas and corporations. So youtube telling us to use IE6 was silly. On top of that, many websites took the popup and made it so you couldn't actually see their content under any circumstances. Those sites simply got ignored by literally everyone on a corporate browser. Largely it was a waste of ti…

> nobody used IE6 except grandmas and corporations. And a fifth of YouTube users at the time. "IE6 users represented around 18% of our user base at that point. We understood that we could not just drop support for it"

A fifth of youtube users were people at work. The same people who aren't allowed to change their browser or tell their boss to upgrade to IE8 so they can watch more youtube.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#24

Post by dfabulich »

This is the first example I've ever heard of where a browser-upgrade banner worked. Every time I've tried it on sites I've worked on, the "please upgrade" banner does nothing.

Years ago, we even tried turning it into an intrusive pop-up for a percentage of users. They just clicked through the pop-up, presumably without reading it.

I wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement?

> Between YouTube, Google Docs, and several other Google properties posting IE6 banners, Google had given permission to every other site on the web to add their own. IE6 banners suddenly started appearing everywhere. Within one month, our YouTube IE6 user base was cut in half and over 10% of global IE6 traffic had dropped off while all other browsers increased in corresponding amounts. The results were better than our web development team had ever intended.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#25

Post by umvi »

acheron wrote: post #16

I like the lawyers being concerned about the possibility they were pushing Chrome. Obviously Google soon decided that wasn’t a problem. (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)

> (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)

Except for the part where you get BSoD and infinite recursion or any of the other stated IE6 nightmares...

Really, the only thing Chrome and IE have in common are market share. Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other way as far as being a web dev goes.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#26

Post by dTal »

Interestingly, according to the graph at the end, IE6 was already well on its way out and they only accelerated its death by a few months. The real effect seems to have been stopping IE7 dead in its tracks, and almost single-handedly catapulting IE8 to the top. A most peculiar effect, despite the banner's promotion of IE8, since only IE6 users should have seen it!

I smell an untold story... maybe one of the other teams' banners was accidentally visible to IE7 users as well? Or did IE7 sometimes spoof IE6?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#27

Post by apo »

Beautiful illustration of what keeps bad ideas going, and what it takes to break them.

> Our boss, in on the conspiracy with us, had thoughtfully recommended that we randomize the order of the browsers listed and then cookie the random seed for each visitor so that the UI would not jump around between pages, which we had done.

It's not exactly clear whether the boss was in on the conspiracy - or whether this was a story told to satisfy the lawyers. If not, this seems a viable strategy for managing the temporary blowback of bending the rules to do the right thing: if you can, make sure your boss ends up looking good.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#28

Post by wvenable »

umvi wrote: post #25
acheron wrote: post #16

I like the lawyers being concerned about the possibility they were pushing Chrome. Obviously Google soon decided that wasn’t a problem. (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)

> (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.) Except for the part where you get BSoD and infinite recursion or any of the other stated IE6 nightmares... Really, the only thing Chrome and IE have in common are market share. Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other way as far as being a web dev goes.

This is the problem when looking back on the past; you miss the context. IE6, at the time in 2001, was the fastest most stable browser out there. It was magnitudes better than Netscape Navigator, which was bloated and far more crash happy. IE6 wasn't always terrible; it was just terrible compared what came after -- which is exactly how things should work.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#29

Post by [deleted] »

behringer wrote: post #23
archgoon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody used IE6 except grandmas and corporations. And a fifth of YouTube users at the time. "IE6 users represented around 18% of our user base at that point. We understood that we could not just drop support for it"

A fifth of youtube users were people at work. The same people who aren't allowed to change their browser or tell their boss to upgrade to IE8 so they can watch more youtube.

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