YouTube's IE6 support dies on March 13 Google will remove IE6-support from YouTube on March 13, according to a web post from the company. In a post to the YouTube help pages, the Mountain View Chocolate Factory indicates that when visiting YouTube, netizens using an "old web browser" are now seeing an interstitial warning that they will soon have to upgrade if they …
It's the browser ballot screen again, except I'm guessing Chrome is always listed first and IE is always the furthest to the right.
I also figure most people will look long enough for the familiar IE icon to catch their eye, but it takes only a small fraction clicking on Chrome instead for "The YouTube upgrade broke my Internet" to be the IT headache of the next few weeks.
Should be interesting to see how much this changes Chrome's share over the next while...
With one caveat...
...the deathtoie6.com site goes to abetterbrowser.org in order to recommend a new browser but that site ought to check to see if the user is running a Windows OS that predates XP before recommending IE8! I tried it using Win2000 and it still recommended IE8 (ok, not as much as it recommends the "proper" browsers). Mind you, the Microsoft IE8 page doesn't check either... but what else would you expect from their crappy coders!!
"As the Web evolves, our goal is to keep up by making YouTube a richer, faster, and more dynamic experience for everyone."
=
More flash ads and popup ads in videos followed by needing to download 100 meg of data just to watch 10 seconds of cheap camera phone video of someone's cat puking up a furball.
Ok wheres the evil google icon ?
Our web dev company stopped supporting IE 6 a year ago, at my vociferous and protracted insistence. Moving to W3C-only development has nearly HALVED our development costs and time-to-deployment in the year to date, for which the CEO is profoundly grateful. He took some persuading, though, and even recently he's been asking whether or not we should look more closely at how many IE 6 visitors our sites are getting. This news will vindicate me and convince him that we've made the right move.
That varies from site to site. The most visits from IE 6 users we've had since going to W3C-only development was on our main retail site last August, with 1287 unique visits in the month out of 23,443 total, which makes it about 5% of traffic. To me, that's 5% that's a small loss, but my CEO would see that as 1287 lost customers, so while it's not a number worth caring about, I haven't exactly bragged about it to the boss! :)
Years of good, solid recommendations by qualified people to move away from IE6 and fuck-all result.
One "Google pwned by naughty Chinese hax0rs" story in the press however.
I don't know why we fucking bother. Nobody's listening to us, IT policy is actually decided by some fat git with column inches to fill on a slow news day in Fleet Street.
It's a really bad idea for the server to only serve a cut-down page by default to certain browsers. There's many more browsers out there than just the standard 5 (moblie browsers for example). Excluding browsers which could render the content perfectly well simply because you haven't got the time, resources etc to verify the sites work well on them is only going to alienate users.
The most which should be done is to warn the user they're using an unsupported browser if you think there's a reason why this might be useful information for them (and having an alternative site available for them to use at their choice is even better) - yahoo does this quite well with it's mail web app, although it is annoying in that it doesn't remember your choice (yes, my netbook is running linux with a non-standard resolution, but it renders yahoo mail perfectly well thank you...)
That's fair enough, but most companies who hire web designers are cheap asses who wouldn't fork out the extra for dough for a companion website let alone the proper amount for their primary site.
It's the very same reason that companies who buy 100% flash websites don't tend to have a HTML alternative unless of course they are swimming in the big bucks.
IE makes the internet UGLY and it's got nothing to do with flash and JS, something as simple as using tranparency in web design or certain CSS techniques becomes a complete pain in the proverbial balls.
...I'm the sole web designer at my place and our site gets 16-17% of total visitors using IE6. The user comes first so I'd best carry on supporting it.
Instead of creating a snazzy site I make them relatively simple and drop in little 'presents' to those who use good browsers afterwards such as transparencies, shadows etc.
The amount of web designers who blindly bitch about IE6 - and stop supporting it - without considering their users is starting to worry me.
Allowing IE6 users to continue to play YouTube video is an enormous cop-out
Given that the entire site's audience goes there to watch video, Google's banner should say "Yep! we're gonna continue to support you IE6 guys, relax! Oooh look at these 5 lovely icons, I wouldn't pay much attention to those!"
If only youtube uses HTML5 exclusively, then a LOT of other video sites will be very happy, as they will get all the 'disgruntled' EX-youtube custom!!!!! :) :)
so watch out google, your scheme to maximize use of chrome may fail... there are a LOT of people out there with old & cheap PC's mainly due to lack of money!!!
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=4f151a4546840ad5&hl=en
quote:
"Firefox supports html5 video tag just fine. Just not the patent encumbered codec google uses which seems to be a poor choice. Is google going to fix this and support firefox's unencumbered choice of codecs? "
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