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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#31

Post by Ajedi32 »

dTal wrote: post #26

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 tea…

I suspect a large part of the success of the campaign had to do with all the news sites covering the story. Those stories would have been seen by a lot of users, regardless of which browser version they were using.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#32

Post by mpol »

dTal wrote: post #26

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 tea…

IE7 was only for a short time the newest Microsoft browser. IE8 lived for a long time, untill eventualy IE9 came about.

IE7 didn't have tabs, IE8 did.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#33

Post by mattmanser »

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.

And IE6 was similarly tons better the Netscape Navigator. It had XmlHttp, inventing Ajax, which revolutionised the web.

Easy to forget that now.

Also, did you know IE6 pioneered the browser web dev tools? IE6 was the first browser you could debug your JavaScript, css and html, which was copied by firebug about 12 months later. I can't even remember what it was called now, IE Dev toolbox? Something strange, you had to download it separately.

And Firebug and Chrome Dev tools copied it almost verbatim. I've never seen any sort of acknowledgement of just how much the community owes to that early tool. The announcement blogs about it were still accessible a few years ago.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#34

Post by chewmieser »

kevan wrote: post #21
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.

That was a scary transition for us, since we did have quite a few legacy browsers regularly accessing our site - we guaranteed support for IE7+ at that time. Extremely thankful for it though, our management wouldn't have made that decision without the push.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#36

Post by whoopdedo »

dTal wrote: post #26

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 tea…

More than that, the graph demonstrates how growth of IE overall dropped off. Up until then IE7 was replacing IE6. After that, no later version of IE ever topped the previous version.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#37

Post by behringer »

dfabulich wrote: post #24

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, G…

There's no way this banner did anything in reality. Corporations didn't upgrade because of their tooling, not youtube. What corporation upgraded to make sure their employees could youtube harder?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#38

Post by anyfoo »

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.

But maybe their boss wanted to keep watching YouTube at work, too.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#39

Post by ljm »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #2

Oh my, this is amazing. I'm not sure the engineers realized despite their secrecy, it would be noticed by the press immediately after deploy. But the best part is how Google engineers immediately on seeing it figured "oh yeah, we should do that too" (although they apparently got the necessary approvals however that was done at Google, it was easier to do because they figured "well, youtube must have done due dillegen…

It's a fascinating tech story, but it would easily turn into a horror if we weren't talking about something like a video hosting platform.

Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive 'old timer' permissions that basically backdoored the company's engineering processes. Even if the engineers saw a good reason to do so.

I mean, who are we to say that this was doing it right? It turned out to be beneficial but there are thousands of ways that this could explode in your face if you tried it yourself.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#40

Post by dTal »

mpol wrote: post #32
dTal wrote: post #26

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 tea…

IE7 was only for a short time the newest Microsoft browser. IE8 lived for a long time, untill eventualy IE9 came about. IE7 didn't have tabs, IE8 did.

Yeah, but the effect of the banner on the graphs of each was sharp and immediate.
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