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.
Well technically, it’s just a conspiracy to deprecate IE6 within YouTube. Although, to be fair, back in 2009, when I was also a full time web developer, IE6 was the bane of my existence. No sane web programmers liked IE6.
The whole thing was a fun read though. It’s like a mini heist done by a bunch of programmers, to jump over a bunch of red tapes within their corporation. Ultimately they just lucked out that the narratives surrounding it was in support of dropping IE6. Otherwise, they’d just be told to kill the banner, one or more of them got fired, and continue supporting IE6.