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posted by martyb on Monday May 06 2019, @05:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the good-riddance dept.

Former Google engineer reveals the secret YouTube plot to kill Internet Explorer 6

Nearly 10 years ago, YouTube started displaying a banner to Internet Explorer 6 users, warning that support for Microsoft's browser would be "phasing out" soon. It was a message that appeared on all YouTube pages, at a time when IE6 users represented around 18 percent of all YouTube traffic. Frustrated by supporting the aging browser, a group of YouTube engineers had hatched a plan to kill Internet Explorer 6.

"We began collectively fantasizing about how we could exact our revenge on IE6," reveals Chris Zacharias, a former Google and YouTube engineer. "The plan was very simple. We would put a small banner above the video player that would only show up for IE6 users." A group of engineers implemented this banner, knowing that most YouTube employees using the company's staging environment wouldn't even see it. At the time, Google had acquired YouTube a few years prior to the IE6 banner and the video sharing site hadn't really fully adapted to Google's infrastructure and policies.

YouTube engineers had created a special set of permissions called "OldTuber," so they could bypass Google's code enforcement policies and make changes directly to the YouTube codebase with limited code reviews. Zacharias and some other engineers were granted OldTuber permissions, allowing them to put the banner in place with very little oversight. "We saw an opportunity in front of us to permanently cripple IE6 that we might never get again," admits Zacharias.

[...] YouTube engineering management eventually realized what had happened, but it was too late and they "begrudgingly arrived at the conclusion that the ends had justified the means." The rebel YouTube engineers succeeded with their secret plan to kill Internet Explorer 6, and by April 2012 IE6 usage had dropped below one percent in the US. Even Microsoft was celebrating IE6's death.

Related: Is Google Using an "Embrace, Extend..." Strategy?
Google Denies Altering YouTube Code to Break Microsoft Edge


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @07:29PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @07:29PM (#839785)

    Say what you will about IE6, but by getting rid of it the cancerous Web 2.0 floodgates were opened fully. And now no day goes by where one doesn't get to bask in said cancer online.

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  • (Score: 2) by sshelton76 on Monday May 06 2019, @07:34PM (3 children)

    by sshelton76 (7978) on Monday May 06 2019, @07:34PM (#839787)

    Yeah but no more activeX, so I'd call it a win!

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @07:37PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @07:37PM (#839792)

      Instead we get all the former activeX cancer seeping into standards via HTML5 and DRM and whatnot thanks to the corporate co-opted W3C.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by sshelton76 on Monday May 06 2019, @07:53PM (1 child)

        by sshelton76 (7978) on Monday May 06 2019, @07:53PM (#839800)

        Perhaps, but there is a huge difference between a closed source activex plugin that is windows only and not even the creators know what all security holes they've opened up for "reasons".

        That vs a web standard in an open source browser where you can audit the code.

        I'll take the standardized security hole, thanks!
        https://strongvpn.blog/webrtc-security-flaw/ [strongvpn.blog]

        • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @08:16PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @08:16PM (#839808)

          The W3C permitted DRM is just that though, closed source binary code that does not have to abide any standard --- only the delivery vector is covered by the standard. It's like activeX in every respect other than scale (right now it covers only video AFAIK, but enough whining from big-donor-corp will get that caveat worked out in no time).

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @11:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @11:10PM (#839892)

    The alternative was Opera which worked like crap on most sites or Netscape which crashed if you looked at it funny. IE6 rocked compared to pretty much everything else from the same time. Then MS let it rot (dipshits). The should have owned the net. For awhile they did. Then they just did not care anymore.