A Conspiracy To Kill IE6

[Wudang]

Or maybe I just have a different view of those times. The frustration of supporting IE was real. But any time emotion started to override professionalism and dispassionate analysis, I noped out. I never really understood people who took pride in having a public tanty about their particular technical hobby horse.

Dispassionate analysis would include the cost of providing support for people using IE6. In many cases it almost required a parallel build of websites to allow standards compatible and IE6.

 

[Tolls]

That's not the point. They sneaked in a warning onto the youtube page that they would stop supporting IE6 "soon", without authorization or any real plan to do so. Which led to a wave of other significant website developing teams using that warning as justification to their bosses to put up similar warnings, cutting the remaining IE6 population to half in short time. And they got away with it because in hindsight everybody agreed that the end justified the means in this case.

Again, they weren't alone.
Companies were already dropping IE6 internally by that point, as it was a cost that did not need to be borne by internal dev teams for internal sites.

That's what fed into the develppment of external sites.

Also note, by the middle of '08 IE6 was down to 1/3rd of traffic.
By the start of '09 it was a quarter (figures from https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php).

That's the figures we used to to argue that external sites should be dropping testing against 6, simply for the cost incurred.

They may have stuck a banner up. We were developing with an agreed "no IE6" policy.

 

[erlando]

Again, they weren't alone.
Companies were already dropping IE6 internally by that point, as it was a cost that did not need to be borne by internal dev teams for internal sites.

That's what fed into the develppment of external sites.

Also note, by the middle of '08 IE6 was down to 1/3rd of traffic.
By the start of '09 it was a quarter (figures from https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php).

That's the figures we used to to argue that external sites should be dropping testing against 6, simply for the cost incurred.

They may have stuck a banner up. We were developing with an agreed "no IE6" policy.

I was doing project work around that time. The pain points from supporting IE6 got so bad that the quote for getting a project done simply doubled if the customer insisted on IE6 support. It was in essence a separate site.

Very few customers chose to have support for IE6. They wanted the banner though. I was happy to implement that. I'm glad if that in any way helped kill the abomination that was IE6.

 

[Childlike Empress]

Again, they weren't alone. [...] They may have stuck a banner up. We were developing with an agreed "no IE6" policy.

The impact of which was next to zero on the whole internet. While the stats the article contains show something ... well, maybe you should read it.

 

[Tolls]

I have.
And I've also gone through the IE6 %ages again.
And it's exactly what I remember from 08 and 09.

They did not kill IE6.

It was dead anyway.
Because, guess what came out a couple of months before their banner?
IE8.
It was why we stopped planning for 6.

Then add that the release of Win7 before the end of the year...

They're staking a claim to something that was happening anyway.

 

[theprestige]

But I think both you and Dudalb are kind of missing the point. The YT people did not actually do anything except threaten to end support at some future date, goading users to update their browsers.



It may not have been such a good idea, but it was not as drastic as it seems.

The drastic bit was bypassing all of their employer's release controls, to put a customer-facing message in production. Without talking to PR. Without talking to legal. On purpose. As a mistake, it'd be forgivable.

 

[halleyscomet]

They're staking a claim to something that was happening anyway.

The releases of IE7 and IE8 did depressingly little to hit IE6's market share, and it was because of business applications. Even Microsoft was comically impotent in getting IE6 to shuffle off the mortal coil. I've personally had to downgrade brand new laptops to Windows XP exclusively because the executive wanted to keep using IE6.

I've spent most my career supporting web services that were used in a business environment. A LOT of internal systems were designed around IE6 and never touched again. It "worked" and nobody wanted to pay for a redesign as long as IE6 could be made to run. What REALLY did in IE6 at the business level was CEO narcissism.

Sites like YouTube, while often blocked for rank and file employees, were always allowed for the upper management levels. The warning that IE6 was deprecated in these products threatened the user experience of the management layer. It was only threatening their precious cat videos that got them on board with upgrading from IE6. Once that happened, the internal sites no longer worked on the new executive laptops, meaning the same mangers who had refused to approve redesigns because "it works" were foaming at the mouth to upgrade, "embarrassingly obsolete internal systems." Suddenly, redesigns to support modern browsers transitioned from being "a techie waste of time and money" to "A critical business practice to remain competitive and secure."

 

[halleyscomet]

I noped out of all the vehement religious arguments decades ago. Emacs or vi? Whatever works, bro. Windows or Mac or Linux? DGAF, TBQH. Etc.

I'd like to clarify a point. Back when IE6 was brand spanking new I had no objection to it. I preferred Netscape Navigator and joked about IE being the "Netscape download Utility" but I didn't criticize IE6 users or try to evangelize them. I came to hate IE6 for a variety of reasons all related to how it aged.

1. Microsoft let IE stagnate for years. This meant it was far behind other browsers in terms of stability, security, and capabilities. Boatloads of interactive features were held back because IE didn't support them.

2. Minor point releases could have a major impact on site design. I remember having to put together a table for management showing the differences between browsers in how relative font size settings like "smaller" and "xxsmall" were interpreted differently by different browsers, when they were supported at all. It was part of a presentation to argue a home-brew CMS should stop using vague names for font sizes and instead go with absolute font sizes. IE had multiple rows in the table because major changes in how these terms were interpreted could happen even in minor revisions. We'd have two people in the same company who were only a single minor point revision apart. One could read an internal site just fine. The other would have large hunks of text too small to read without a magnifying glass.

3. Users didn't upgrade. I don't think there was ever a point where IE7 had a bigger market share than IE6. By the time people upgraded from IE6, IE7 and in many cases IE8 were already heading out the door. This was a disservice to both browsers as they were pretty good for their time.

 

[Childlike Empress]

3. Users didn't upgrade. I don't think there was ever a point where IE7 had a bigger market share than IE6. By the time people upgraded from IE6, IE7 and in many cases IE8 were already heading out the door. This was a disservice to both browsers as they were pretty good for their time.

According to the trend graphic contained in the article, IE7 had (slowly) overtaken IE6 a year before the conspiracy-induced warning banner wave took place, and both suffered massively from it while IE8 jumped from almost zero to over 15%.

 

[Tolls]

IE8 came out only a couple of months prior to the YouTube stuff above.
And it was far more significant than 7 since it was a "proper" modern browser.

I agree 7 never made much of a dent, though it does take over from 6 if you see the page I link to above, around the end of 2008.

People upgraded to 8 pretty quickly (compared to the uptake of 7). Being part of Win7 helped a lot. IE8 was up to 25% by Jan 2010, by which time 6 had dropped to 10%.

 

[halleyscomet]

According to the trend graphic contained in the article, IE7 had (slowly) overtaken IE6 a year before the conspiracy-induced warning banner wave took place, and both suffered massively from it while IE8 jumped from almost zero to over 15%.

[qimg]https://i.imgur.com/GcSwkry.jpg[/qimg]

Ahh, here we see a difference between the Internet at large and the segment I had to worry about when I did web development. The data I had to contend with was based on logs from the servers I maintained. I'm glad to see the special Hell I was in was not reflective of the larger world. I had IE6 ranking at 40% and higher of the traffic on one site well into 2010.