YouTube Phasing Out Support For IE6 481
Oracle Goddess sends word that YouTube is presenting IE6 users with a banner exhorting them to upgrade to a modern browser, and TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube will be phasing out support for IE6 soon. This Twitter search reflects the jubilation breaking out all over the Net at the imminent demise of this most despised and non-standards-compliant browser. The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.
About time (Score:5, Funny)
Good. That's like phasing out of support for cancer.
Re:About time (Score:5, Funny)
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> Perhaps next, they can follow Slashdot's example and phase out support for web browsers.
This may actually be an advantage:
show_articles.sh YouTube-Phasing-Out-Support-For-IE6 | sed s/IE6/Windows/g | more
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Mod Informative, please. (Score:3, Informative)
I have to agree.
I prefer to use a web browser, not an add-on, extension fluffed "application display system." HTML. No CSS, no mime-types, no scripting.
I can't say when, but /. changed something to make using this site painful 6-12 months ago.
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Yeah what the hell is wrong with Slashdot these days. I'm using Firefox (not even an 'evil' browser like IE) and Slashdot renders all weird ... all this extra green space under the Slashdot logo at the top etc...
Re:About time (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Except IE is the only one that works with YouTu (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny is they don't figure what actually made youtube succsessful.
Youtube would work in any browser which manages to run Flash in it. That is the trick. Nothing else needed. If Flash runs, Youtube is there even including mobile browsers (e.g. Nokia).
Can't IE really display comments and Google ads? That is all needed for youtube. Flash works in its own way, glory days of "live script" is over really. Sad but true.
IE 6 is still used on large corporations and there is no chance you will be able to "upgrade to chrome" unless you want a visit from BOFH with your manager asking what the hell you are trying to achieve. Yes, a managed client these days won't just stop you, it will also alert admin via security solution, "attempt to install unauthorised software" in recession would be a nice excuse for them.
Oh BTW, unless some miracle happens and a open source/standard commitee invents something which will be a 1.1 MB download, without any dictation of software, completely supported in number 1 pro design suite and various pro video authoring/serving solutions, Flash is there to stay.
HTML5 video would have a huge chance if they were wise to adopt H264 as standard and Dirac as optional codec. Also publicly bitching/whining/attacking both Apple and Adobe which are called "mecca of multimedia" won't really help.
Market share (Score:5, Informative)
The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.
According to whom? Even on w3schools.com [w3schools.com], which is visited almost exclusively by web developers, more than 14% of people are still using IE6.
Re:Market share (Score:4, Informative)
Web developers are probably more likely to have IE6 around than your typical user since they need it for their job. I use Firefox exclusively at home, but when I'm having problems getting something to work on the job and need to look up a reference, I occasionally use IE either by mistake or just because I happen to be in it already.
Re:Market share (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't justify that many people browsing the reference site using your test browser. People aren't mistakenly using IE6 to look up the HTML reference, they're using IE6 because that's what they always use. Look at the usage numbers, Firefox is almost at 50%, Chrome is already at 6%. That is indicative of web developers, not using a browser that is 9 years old. Web developers might be more likely to have IE6 installed, but they're not going to browse with it. Web developers are more likely to have a favorite browser to do all of their normal tasks in, and they'll use that one.
Also, I'm a web developer and don't have IE6 installed, on any of my machines. I have access to it, but not on any computer I use on a regular basis. The debugging tools in IE8 are much better for web developers than having IE6 available to test on.
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Definitely. Like I said below, IE6 has lingered around like a bad fart, hopefully this signals the true beginning of the end.
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On ye olde business side, where IE6 is more likely to be lurking, IT controls the upgrade path with an iron fist and probably considers user inability
Re:Market share (Score:5, Insightful)
And Windows 2000 users.
Re:Market share (Score:5, Funny)
Sure they count! How could they dispense a set amount of money otherwise.
Re:Market share (Score:4, Informative)
Your solution is here. [technipages.com] I even have Windows Defender running on Win2K after using this tool.
Re:Market share (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Market share (Score:5, Informative)
This is the case in my office, where IE6 is the approved standard, and no one is allowed to use FireFox or Opera or Chrome unless they can submit a written justification to the IT standards committee and obtain their approval. That is rare.
This is mainly because we use several different web-based applications developed in-house for submitting travel claims and interfacing with our purchasing department's back-end databases, all built years ago on non-standards-compliant IE6 code. The team of contractors who developed these apps are long gone, and updating them would require finding a new contractor and paying them to re-build all the apps from scratch, a difficult sell to management in today's economy. It ain't broke, they say, so why fix it?
Re:Market share (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Market share (Score:4, Insightful)
Or they could roll-out FireFox (with NoScript) as the default browser using Group Policy with FireMotion's FireFox MSI [frontmotion.com] and create shortcuts on the desktop with a target of "iexplore http://your.wretched.old.internal.app.com/ [app.com]".
More security, same ol' craptastic IE6 "experience" for your internal apps.
Re:Market share (Score:4, Informative)
IE8 allows you to disable standards-compliance mode for just this reason - in fact, I believe it even defaults to IE6's rendering engine for any intranet address.
Unless you're on Win2k or older, there's absolutely no reason to still be using IE6.
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If nothing else, it's going to make the VPs and PHBs running the company aware that their IE6-only software is relying on technology that is, at the very least, out of date. The people signing the checks (stereotypically) don't understand the technology involved and don't see a compelling reason to fund an upgrade to their software. This will help point out to those people that IE6 is obsolete technology and should be migrated away from. They can have IT create reports about it until they're blue in the
Re:Market share (Score:5, Insightful)
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A Joomla! site I built, for example, all open source as it is, takes forever to render in Chrome, and shows CSS overlap errors in Firefox. IE 7 renders it perfectly.
It is 100% your fault if you chose a template that is crap. Joomla is what you make it. It is no different than if you got a contractor to design a website and they didn't w3c validate it and only checked it in IE7.
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w3schools doesn't do validation, that's the W3C.
Re:Market share (Score:5, Insightful)
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Lot's of corporations still have IE 6 as their "corporate IT approved" browser.
This. This. This. Our web apps are written exclusively for big companies and we're still stuck supporting IE6 because our customers absolutely require it. It's painful. *sigh* What I wouldn't do to go Office Space on something that represents IE6.
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Sorry, was there a poorly-stated joke in there? Replying with "whoosh" is no excuse for not being able to craft a joke that's actually funny.
Legacy systems (Score:4, Insightful)
And who cares about corporations who refuse to move on from a tool that even the creator has killed off?
You do. Forget Windows and IE - do you have ANY idea how many POS (Point Of Sale) systems there are out there that still rely on DOS? The answer will scare you. "Upgrading" software is an expense and a potential business risk. Sometimes the rewards are not worth the expense. I have clients that have computer systems that are 10, 15 and even 25 years old and not about the be replaced anytime soon. You can make a very profitable living maintaining and integrating legacy systems and there are lots out there.
Survival of the fittest always wins, always.
And what, pray tell, is your definition of fittest? Unfortunately I can think of many definitions of fittest that don't equal best, modern, up-to-date, robust or (sadly) secure.
Why the hell don't some companies allow the use of another browser?
Cost mostly. Typically they have some old code that will cost money to update and they can't make a business case to do it yet. Usually they'll upgrade in due time but it might take years or even decades.
Re:Market share (Score:5, Interesting)
Might be SPAM bots, they fake user-agents all the time and try to either hide as a major search engine or as a user.
I am currently working on a question/answer based CAPTCHA system + bot trap and monitor the user agents triggering my bot trap.
So far,
59 falsely claimed to be Googlebot
The rest claim to be some version of IE
Don't rely on anything for user-agents, I am identifying myself as Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html) right now to get around websites offering unlocked content to Google but require registrations from normal users.
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Which websites are those? Experts-exchange puts the content waaaaaay down the page, but it's there if you scroll down far enough. (Apparently Google got pissy over the fact that they were giving Google content that they didn't let normal visitors see... or that's how I heard it, anyway.)
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I just used it today to get a research paper which required me to come from the universities network OR be Google. I think they use Google Custom Search on an Intranet site so need Google to index things. The major flaw here is that they accept by user-agent and don't check if the originating IP is owned by Google. .... I need to look into that :)
Now that I think about it, maybe they even use Referer: to validate internal network IPs
But mostly adult sites with images on Google image search and some smaller
Re:Market share (Score:5, Informative)
Testing what? Testing the w3schools site? Wouldn't you want to have your main browser open for references and things even though you might have another test browser open? Hell, I usually develop with 3 browsers open (Firefox, to use Firebug for debugging my Javascript stuff, Chrome to show the Javascript-heavy API docs, and Opera for everything else).
IE6 has lingered around like a bad fart, hopefully this signals the true beginning of the end.
I don't know... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I don't know... (Score:5, Informative)
This hamburger is decent, aside from the fact that it's growing mold and smells like urine.
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Re:I don't know... (Score:5, Informative)
ActiveX
Non-standard HTML rendering
Lack of tabs
ActiveX
Lack of support for many standard files (PNG, anyone?)
Crashing when fed simple code
Oh, and ActiveX.
Re:I don't know... (Score:5, Funny)
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IE6 was a decent browser, aside from the fact it was a pain to code for and insecure.
Huh? So aside from arguably two of the most important pieces of a browser, it was a decent browser? Are you just talking about the sparse UI? A UI doesn't make otherwise shitty software somehow good (and, if you want to talk about IE's user interface, make sure to mention the giant checkbox list under Internet Options). IE7 was an incremental improvement over IE6, and IE8 was a major improvement over both versions.
Re:I don't know... (Score:5, Insightful)
IE6 was a decent browser, aside from the fact it was a pain to code for and insecure.
Car analogy:
IE8 is your your new car. It runs smooth, and there are no real complaints about the reliability. The seats are little on the hard side, and you'd like more leg room.
IE6 is your old car. It broke down every other week, belched poisonous black smoke into the cars around it, and the doors didn't close properly. But the seats were soft and you had more leg room.
Your old car was 'decent' the same way IE6 was decent.
And lets face it, IE8's UI isn't terrible. You might not be used to it, or like it as much, but its objectively not all that bad. They've moved things around, and hid a lot of stuff almost nobody used. But the tab support and integrated search alone make the UI superior. I don't find it slow (but I have lots of RAM). I still prefer Firefox, but I no longer loathe using (or developing for) Internet Explorer.
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No offense, but that's exactly the type of bullshit Microsoft wants you to believe. They've implemented some of the CSS stuff, but they're a LONG way from meeting a standard even as simple as FF1.5.
Call me when IE's DOM support leaves the DOM1 standard and moves on to the DECADE OLD DOM2 support. Then we'll talk.
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Quite true. But I will not be satisfied until IE7 support is phased out. The UI is fine, but the engine is still crap. IE8 at least brings Microsoft up to about Firefox 1.5, if not 2.0.
Fortunately, it will be easy to gradually phase out IE7. Nobody is stuck relying on IE7 the way they're stuck relying on IE6. Anything that works in IE7 but not in other browsers should be very easy to make work in IE8's compatibility mode, if indeed any changes are required at all, although hopefully that won't be a common situation. When IE7 came out, I think most people with IE6-only web sites realized that rebuilding them to support standards-compliant browsers wouldn't really be any harder than rebu
Praise Jeebus! (Score:5, Funny)
What is needed is a good exorcism. IE6 needs to be cast out from the net and its bloated carcass nailed to a tree as a lesson to others.
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AFAIK web browsers cannot run for president...
oh wait, who were YOU talking about?
Re:Praise Jeebus! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Praise Jeebus! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Praise Jeebus! (Score:5, Funny)
Should that be "Don't phase me, bro!"?
I *WISH* it was down in the single digits (Score:5, Insightful)
My experiences with large corp and gov't clients tells me otherwise.
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I agree, where i work we have 30000+ workstations. IE7 was proven to buggy so its not being deployed.
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My experiences with large corp and gov't clients tells me otherwise.
Large corporations and governments* should hopefully not be major youtube users, so this really shouldn't be a problem here anyways.
* ... or is the gazillions of narcissistic emo-videos on youtube some sort of CIA demotivation campaign?
My feelings... (Score:2)
Hello? IT Department? (Score:2, Funny)
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cool (Score:3, Interesting)
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The future is nao!
Sometimes I truly wonder what the fuck we think we're doing with computers.
Re: cool (Score:4, Funny)
Watching porn.
Was it really that hard to figure out?
Still mandatory where I work (Score:5, Interesting)
I know quite a few LARGE corporate environments that won't be upgrading any time soon since IE7/8 "breaks" their intranet web apps and they aren't about to budget for updating apps that work on the existing browser.
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cant firefox be installed on a system with IE6 and IEtab used for the intranet apps, while firefox used for internet??
Re:Still mandatory where I work (Score:4, Interesting)
And nothing of value was lost. n/t (Score:2)
N/t
Last I checked, I couldn't upgrade (Score:4, Insightful)
IE7 doesn't run on Windows 2000.
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Last time I checked, the year is 2009. The only reason to run Win2k at this point is in a VM. Now would be a good time to upgrade.
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No #!%$ DRM, no activation, and at least through SP2 (SP4 was changed, but I never looked at SP3) no license agreement that explicitly allows Microsoft access to your hard drive.
Every Microsoft OS since Windows 2000 has been a downgrade.
FF works fine, thank you, and, since Microsoft no longer supports it, I don't have to deal with their illegal "you have to run Windows to get patches".
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It doesn't matter that it's 2009. Lots of companies are still running W2K because they're cheap and lazy. There's one or two guys in my workgroup here who are running W2K, and they can't upgrade 1) because IT won't pay for the XP licenses, and 2) because their computers are so old and slow (and have no free HD space) they wouldn't run XP anyway.
Yes, a new computer capable of running XP quite well probably only costs about $500-600 from Dell (not including monitor), but apparently that's too much for our I
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Firefox does.
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Not for long...
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/06/08/1240239.shtml [slashdot.org]
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Firefox does though, so I fail to see the problem.
no need of restrictions then (Score:5, Interesting)
if IE6 is not supported by youtube, and many other popular, non work related sites follow suit, wouldnt enterprises prefer to keep IE6 as it would automatically prevent employees from accessing video/social networking sites from work, and additional money would not have to be spent on proxies and other content restriction system??
since their own apps are in house they can keep IE6 forever w/o any problems
Re:no need of restrictions then (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, the IT team can just rename the IE6 icon as "ERP Interface" or something, and install Firefox, naming its icon "Web Browser".
Voila, internal apps keep working but employees are no longer at risk due to IE6 use on the wild wild internet.
Even better if as a company they block IE6 access to external sites, so people who try to use their ERP software to browse the web would be cut off and told to launch Firefox.
That's a bit sensationalist (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, there's a virtual kegger going on over at Twitter about this. Is that going to be our new gauge of how things are going on in the computing world? Has netcraft confirmed it?
Slight problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, we still run across many many clients who still mandate IE6 in their workplace. No upgrading to IE7/8, no other browsers than IE6, etc.
So they'll upgrade finally now too, right?
Nope - those are also the same companies that probably block access to YouTube for bandwidth/time wasting reasons.
Why even support a browser? (Score:2)
Why not just support the official html standard and be done with it?
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Assuming you're not just trolling...
As a developer, you support the browsers, not the standard, because the standards are vague and contradictory in places, which leads to different browsers implementing the standard in different ways.
Oh, and because no browser fully supports any version of the HTML, XHTML, or CSS standards.
Flash (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if YouTube would only phase out support for Flash...
I know, I know, wishful thinking. But I do secretly think that YouTube could single-handedly decide which video format(s) become supported (or, if not in the specification, at least popular) for HTML 5. Chrome supports both Theora and H.264, but their HTML 5 test page [youtube.com] uses H.264. Not my personal first choice, but certainly a lot better than Flash.
In any case, I can't wait for this imaginary day when YouTube goes Flash-less. :)
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YouTube has always been Flash-less on iPhone/iPod touch.
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There is an option for the uploader to disable their video from being played off the Youtube website itself, that's more than likely what you're running into. Also, that is kind of incorrect, all HQ/HD videos -are- h264 content (find a Youtube downloader, you'll get an .mp4 file, but the non HQ/HD are .flv) but the problem you're referring to is it's being played through Flash instead of directly through the browser.
WAIT A SECOND!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Corporate Intranets (Score:2)
Don't start celebrating prematurely. There's a good article [quirksmode.org] on Quirksmode about why IE6 will continue to live on corporate intranets.
BRAVO. Earns my respect double on this... (Score:5, Interesting)
First, actions like this from massively broad based sites are critical to finally wiping the scourge of IE6 development off the planet. So initial Kudos to YouTube for taking the step.
Of course, YouTube == Google; so no shock that they're willing to disparage IE6, right?
But here's the difference between Google and Microsoft --
The banner shown here, on YouTube (owned by Google) doesn't JUST list Chrome as the upgrade path. It clearly gives equal exposure to Chrome, Firefox, and IE8 -- the biggest competing product to its own browser.
That's the right way to do be competitive in a social networking context. I think we know that if this was say, Bing! or Hotmail, it would show a link to IE8 but that's it. Well, ok, we don't KNOW that, but most of us assume it. I certainly do.
Market Share. (Score:3, Informative)
Opera just doesn't have that much market share. Neither does Chrome, but well, that is the home field favorite on YouTube/Google. As far as Safari, how many non-mac people even know what it is, let alone that there's a PC version? I have it, I like it and think it's excellent, but it's pretty unusual to find on a PC.
Actually - IE6 has over 15% market share (Score:2, Informative)
Okay I'll do it! (Score:3, Funny)
I saw this message today an decided to upgrade my browser. That's the internet, right? I called AOL and told them to upgrade my internet please. They happily obliged. It seems like the same internet to me and I still get the message on youtube.
In other news - cubicle productivity soars (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't bother me. (Score:3, Interesting)
AFAIK, the only people who use IE6 (including me) do so because their job uses it. Very few jobs (including mine) allow Youtubing at work anyway, so why SHOULD they continue to support it?
Twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
This Twitter search reflects the jubilation breaking out all over the Net
All that twitter search shows is that people who use twitter are commenting on it. It does not show jubilation breaking out all over the Net.
Nice banner. What about other browsers? (Score:3, Interesting)
So I had a look at the banner mentioned, and I find it odd that it states "Please upgrade to one of these modern browsers" followed by only IE8, FF3.5, and Google Chrome. Why not mention (or even hint at) the fact that other "modern browsers" also exist. You know, browsers like Opera or Safari (the OS default for MAC users), or any others. Simply re-wording the banner to something like "Please upgrade to a modern browser such as the following" would be much more polite.
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If you're running IE6 is it likely that you're using a modern Mac with Safari on it? Wouldn't it already have this installed? I'm guessing Opera isn't on the list because it isn't free...but that's just a guess. Yes, rewording things would've been more polite.
There's Safari for Windows, and Opera has been free for many years now.
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YouTube has various fly-out menus and the like, which generally a PITA to get working in IE6, especially if you have flash all over the page.
Not to mention IT workers are lazy SOBs, and if they can't sit around and watch videos all day, they might get off their butt and upgrade everyone off IE6. :^)
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Re:Support? What do you mean, support? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly what I was going to say. Provide a simple link to a video file and even lynx could view Youtube.
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Yes, yes it does [opera.com].
Even Windows 95.
Re:If you get rid of IE6, you will rid also Win2K (Score:5, Insightful)
You refuse to use XP, Vista, Linux, Opera and Firefox, but IE6 is peachy-keen?
Lol.