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.
cool (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't know... (Score:1, Interesting)
The navigation buttons are all clustered together (unlike IE 7). That's the only advantage I see. For me, a browser without tabs is 100% useless.
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.
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
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.
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.
Re:Still mandatory where I work (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Last I checked, I couldn't upgrade (Score:1, Interesting)
what does modern software provide beyond skyrocketing executable size, memory use, and cpu saturation per useful feature?
Re:Last I checked, I couldn't upgrade (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
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.
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?
Re:Flash (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Last I checked, I couldn't upgrade (Score:3, Interesting)
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 IT department to support programmers who are currently wasting lots of man-hours watching their computers s-l-o-w-l-y compile code.
However, we don't have too much trouble spending lots of money on engineering tools. But that comes out of a different department's budget, so it's OK. Since our computers come out of the IT department's budget, they refuse to upgrade us, ever, as it makes their spending look bad.
Re:Market share (Score:3, Interesting)
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 sites offering pdfs and other indexable content to Google.
Re:Market share (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Last I checked, I couldn't upgrade (Score:3, Interesting)
Not for long...
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/06/08/1240239.shtml [slashdot.org]
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.
Re:Nice banner. What about other browsers? (Score:2, Interesting)