Ex-YouTube engineer reveals how video site worked to kill off Internet Explorer 6

[Arthur]

Source: Chris Zacharias's Blog (via Ars Technica)

 

A Conspiracy To Kill IE6

The bittersweet consequence of YouTube’s incredible growth is that so many stories will be lost underneath all of the layers of new paint. This is why I wanted to tell the story of how, ten years ago, a small team of web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube and got away with it.

 

[...]

 

The plan was very simple. We would put a small banner above the video player that would only show up for IE6 users. It would read “We will be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade to one of these more modern browsers.” Next to the text would be links to the current versions of the major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, IE8 and eventually, Opera. The text was intentionally vague and the timeline left completely undefined. We hoped that it was threatening enough to motivate end users to upgrade without forcing us to commit to any actual deprecation plan. Users would have the ability to close out this warning if they wanted to ignore it or deal with it later. The code was designed to be as subtle as possible so that it would not catch the attention of anyone monitoring our checkins. Nobody except the web development team used IE6 with any real regularity, so we knew it was unlikely anyone would notice our banner appear in the staging environment. We even delayed having the text translated for international users so that a translator asking for additional context could not inadvertently surface what we were doing. Next, we just needed a way to slip the code into production without anyone catching on.

 

[...]

 

I had met a few engineers on the Google Docs team while working on some shared Javascript libraries. I reached out to one and asked how they had arrived at the decision to launch their own banner. He explained to me that they had been wanting to deprecate IE6 support for a long time but their managers would not let them for the same reasons we had always heard. One of their engineers testing in IE6 had noticed the YouTube banner pretty shortly after it went live and immediately took it to their manager as evidence as to why they should do the same. Shortly thereafter, the Google Docs engineers whipped up their own IE6 banner and pushed it into production, presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals. The first time many Googlers heard chatter about IE6 banners was from email threads where other teams had begun asking if they could deprecate IE6 like Google Docs had. Luck would have it that this had included many of our managers. Amazingly, we had somehow bypassed detection as the originators of the IE6 banner inside of Google.

 

Eventually the YouTube engineering management did ask themselves how the decision to deprecate IE6 was ultimately made, given it happened so quickly and seemed conspicuously premature for a media site of our scale and with such a wide user base. Once they realized what had happened, they cornered our boss for details, grappled with the consequences of our actions and begrudgingly arrived at the conclusion that the ends had justified the means. Between YouTube, Google Docs, and several other Google properties posting IE6 banners, Google had given permission to every other site on the web to add their own. IE6 banners suddenly started appearing everywhere. Within one month, our YouTube IE6 user base was cut in half and over 10% of global IE6 traffic had dropped off while all other browsers increased in corresponding amounts. The results were better than our web development team had ever intended.

 

 

The year is 2009. YouTube, four years old, has become the Web's leading video site. Though Internet Explorer 6 was far from current—it had been superseded by versions 7 and 8—it nonetheless made up some 18 percent of YouTube's traffic. These were, after all, the dark days of Windows XP; corporations had overwhelmingly stuck with Windows XP in spite of the release of Windows Vista, and Windows 7 was still some months from release. Many organizations still running XP appeared to be wishing for a kind of computational stasis: they wanted to be able to run Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 forever, unchanging, which would greatly simplify their maintenance and support costs.

 

But Internet Explorer 6 was nearly eight years old and seriously showing its age. On its release, the browser had a legitimate claim to be the best, fastest, most standards compliant, and most stable mainstream browser around. But those days were long gone. Compared to the alternatives—Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, and Google's Chrome—it was slow, unstable, and riddled with proprietary, non-standard behaviors. This was causing the team developing YouTube considerable pain, with weeks of extra work each development cycle to ensure that the site still worked correctly in the old browser.

 

According to former YouTube developer Chris Zacharias, this pain prompted the YouTube team to take renegade action to drive users away from Internet Explorer 6 and onto something newer and better. Though YouTube had been under Google's ownership for about three years, YouTube's engineers were suspicious and wary of being integrated into Google's corporate machine. They had their own special set of permissions named "OldTuber," and anyone with OldTuber permissions could freely modify the YouTube site without going through Google's usual change management process of code reviews, testing, adherence to coding standards, and so on. It was cowboy territory, where developers could do as they liked. Only the risk of breaking things—and hence losing OldTuber permissions, if not their job—kept them on the straight and narrow.

 

The OldTubers decided that they'd show a banner to Internet Explorer 6 users. The banner declared that YouTube would phase out support for their browser "soon" and that they should instead use Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, or Chrome, with those three options shown in a random order to try to avoid being accused of favoring any one browser over the others. Without any oversight or supervision, the banner was duly deployed.

 

Almost immediately, the tech media spotted the banner and reported on it, earning the OldTubers a visit from a rather taken-aback PR team that was now being asked when and why the end of Internet Explorer 6 support was happening. But since the reaction among the media was largely positive—Internet Explorer 6 being widely recognized as obsolete and irritating for almost all Web developers—the PR team was quickly brought on-side.

 

Next, the OldTubers had to field questions from company lawyers who were initially worried that the banner appeared to give undue prominence to Chrome, as their browsers showed Chrome first. But their worries were assuaged once the randomization was demonstrated.

Edited May 3, 2019 by Arthur