The Slow Death of IE 6 Support
Many sites have been slowly crying off of IE 6 support
Many sites have been slowly crying off of IE 6 support, and big boys like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and YouTube are joining the action. What is interesting about the YouTube story is the placement of the upgrade buttons.
Twitter took the tact of “if the user is using browser X, I will just prompt them to get the latest version”. If you are in IE 6, prompt for IE 8. YouTube sandwiches IE 8 in between Chrome and Firefox.
With the impending move, YouTube follows in the footsteps of that other Web 2.0 poster child, Digg, which recently hinted at wanting to cut support for the browser too. Digg’s User Experience Architect Mark Trammell at the time wrote that the site is strongly considering removing essential features like digging and commenting for IE6 users. He explained that while IE6 users make up around 5% of site traffic, it only accounts for 1% of diggs, buries, and comments.
YouTube so far hasn’t officially communicated about the desire to drop support for IE6, but it’s conceivable that like Digg it would rather have its developers spend time optimizing the service for newer, better browsers than wasting man hours on the oft-despised Microsoft browser. We recently reported that Internet Explorer is losing market share to Firefox and Safari at a rapid pace.
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