from Hacker News

A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

by zacman85 on 5/1/19, 4:25 PM with 363 comments

by jrochkind1 on 5/1/19, 5:58 PM
Oh my, this is amazing.
I'm not sure the engineers realized despite their secrecy, it would be noticed by the press immediately after deploy.
But the best part is how Google engineers immediately on seeing it figured "oh yeah, we should do that too" (although they apparently got the necessary approvals however that was done at Google, it was easier to do because they figured "well, youtube must have done due dillegence before doing it.")
Amazing!
I don't know how they didn't all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special "OldTuber" priv long before.
But... it worked! This is a hacker story for the history books, it sounds like the kind of thing programmers did 20+ years ago for nothing except the reward of doing it right (against their own career interests), that I feel like doesn't happen so much in a more professionalized industry.
by cpeterso on 5/1/19, 6:13 PM
Is this a charming story about helping users upgrade to modern web browsers or a dark parable about the influence of tech giants?
Compare with ex-Firefox VP Johnathan Nightingale's recent thread about Google "amateur hour" and "oopses" that only affected Firefox:
https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686
by floatrock on 5/1/19, 6:16 PM
Was struggling with legacy IE6 support-hacks too once while building healthcare webapps. In that field, it was more because hospital IT admins lock everything down and upgrading stuff very much falls under the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra.
We too got fed up with all the IE6-specific hacks we had to maintain. One day on the login page, we added a "IE6 might be a HIPAA violation, please upgrade your system" banner. It was technically true... the browser was well past its end-of-life support and was acquiring a running list of unpatched security holes.
Our analytics showed the remaining holdouts upgraded their systems over the next few months.
by dfabulich on 5/1/19, 6:29 PM
This is the first example I've ever heard of where a browser-upgrade banner worked. Every time I've tried it on sites I've worked on, the "please upgrade" banner does nothing.
Years ago, we even tried turning it into an intrusive pop-up for a percentage of users. They just clicked through the pop-up, presumably without reading it.
I wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement?
> 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.
by codedokode on 5/1/19, 10:35 PM
To anyone thinking it was a good deed: please remember that later Google used similar techiniques against other browsers, like Opera. They showed a warning about an "unsupported browser" but if the user changed user-agent to Firefox or Chrome, everything worked. Another example is Web version of Skype which is very picky and doesn't work in many browsers, like mobile browsers, or slightly outdated Firefox.
For example, tomorrow Google can implement a DRM that would require a plugin that works on Windows, Android (with Google Play Services) or Mac, but not on Linux. After all, Linux is not a DRM-friendly system (allowing the user to hack anything is not what copyright holders want), and almost nobody uses it on desktop, so why bother supporting it? Or Google can use it against new, not yet very popular browser, to slow its adoption.
by dTal on 5/1/19, 6:30 PM
Interestingly, according to the graph at the end, IE6 was already well on its way out and they only accelerated its death by a few months. The real effect seems to have been stopping IE7 dead in its tracks, and almost single-handedly catapulting IE8 to the top. A most peculiar effect, despite the banner's promotion of IE8, since only IE6 users should have seen it!
I smell an untold story... maybe one of the other teams' banners was accidentally visible to IE7 users as well? Or did IE7 sometimes spoof IE6?
by crazygringo on 5/1/19, 9:19 PM
Besides being a great story, this is a perfect example of how corporations aren't people.
Corporations don't have single agendas, they don't think with one mind, they can't be simplified to a single narrative.
Rather, they're collections of 1,000's of individual each doing their own theing, and the CEO is trying (and often failing) to herd the cats in a single logical direction.
Plenty of good things (like this) can come out of it. But also plenty of bad things, like security breaches, anticompetitive behavior, and invasions of privacy.
Whenever anyone says "because Google always does <x>" or "Google is always like <x>", a story like this is a great antidote.
by acheron on 5/1/19, 6:19 PM
I like the lawyers being concerned about the possibility they were pushing Chrome. Obviously Google soon decided that wasn’t a problem.
(And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)
by puzzle on 5/2/19, 3:00 AM
Oh, God. I forgot about the empty src bug. YouTube wasn't the only substantial Google service affected by it from time to time. But I remember it differently.
Yes, it triggered a GET for /. But that generated HTML (usually the service's homepage, as was our case), which the browser would attempt to parse as an image, obviously failing. It would not trigger a recursive fetching of all the resources on the page. Even without recursion, it already inflicted major damage, because our service's homepage was dynamic, while the resources linked from it were mostly static (and thus a lot cheaper, as well as cacheable). I think I would have noticed if it multiplied other traffic, not just the homepage.
This was the bane of my existence for many months. Every few weeks I would have to fire up Dremel and try to figure what was causing the spurious page loads. I hated and still hate SQL, so that was no fun. I knew when it was time to investigate thanks to our human monitoring system: our PMs would get excited or puzzled by a sudden jump in the page view dashboards. (They lived by those graphs...)
Thank you Chris and co. for your contributions in killing the browser version from hell.
by tracker1 on 5/1/19, 8:18 PM
I was working on an SPA around this time in an internal environment at a large bank. IE6 was the bane of my existence and the memory leaks in IE<8 made the application unusable after being open for around 5 hours. The early solution was to close the application at lunch, the longer term was portable firefox and later an exception for Firefox proper for those users specifically, while IE8 exploration for support was in progress.
Around the same time, there was a Chrome in IE plugin that was also suggested for other applications but never got approved.
People complain about the progression/changes in JS since around 2010 (node, commonjs, es5+). But nothing is so bad as dealing with the really old browsers. IE6 was decent at release but became a boat anchor to the industry. Even then, you couldn't pay me enough to ever support IE4.x + NN4.x ever again.
Wonderful story.
by skunkworker on 5/1/19, 6:12 PM
I loved the part when the Docs team added their own because they were "presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals....Amazingly, we had somehow bypassed detection as the originators of the IE6 banner inside of Google."
by everdev on 5/1/19, 8:00 PM
> 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.
This was one of the happiest days off my web development career when I could finally tell clients to drop IE6 support because "even Google is doing it."
Amazing to hear how the tail wagged the dog to achieve this :)
by settsu on 5/1/19, 8:52 PM
I'm not one for hero worship, but I want to buy everyone involved a beverage.
From '08-'10, I was in web design & development at a company that was neck-deep in IE6 dependency. The animus I harbored for IE6 was so intensely palpable that there were days where I was mere moments from getting a tattoo permanently documenting my burning hate for what I still reckon as the worst piece of software ever known, based on reach, potential for issues caused, and total net effort expended on all mitigations.
by apo on 5/1/19, 6:34 PM
Beautiful illustration of what keeps bad ideas going, and what it takes to break them.
> Our boss, in on the conspiracy with us, had thoughtfully recommended that we randomize the order of the browsers listed and then cookie the random seed for each visitor so that the UI would not jump around between pages, which we had done.
It's not exactly clear whether the boss was in on the conspiracy - or whether this was a story told to satisfy the lawyers. If not, this seems a viable strategy for managing the temporary blowback of bending the rules to do the right thing: if you can, make sure your boss ends up looking good.
by NeoBasilisk on 5/1/19, 11:55 PM
Anyone that started developing in the IE9 era or later cannot comprehend how painful it was to develop for IE6. You simply have no frame of reference whatsoever. Any gripes you have about IE9 or later sound like a joke in comparison. Even IE8 was a huge improvement.
by vilius on 5/2/19, 7:32 AM
> 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.
YouTube started a domino effect with this. I remember I was working at a web agency at the time. And when I saw YouTube's banner regarding IE6 it was my "this is it" moment. I rushed my boss trying to convince him we should stop making our client websites IE6 compatible. He considered it and started incorporating YouTube IE6 stance in every client proposal from that moment.
by syphilis2 on 5/1/19, 7:53 PM
This is a fun story and an easy read. I like how much hand wringing there was about possibly favoring Chrome. Earlier this year YouTube showed me a similar banner: "Watch YouTube videos with Chrome. Yes, get Chrome now." https://i.postimg.cc/x8cFCcB2/Google.png
by sethammons on 5/1/19, 8:12 PM
> To cement their authority over the YouTube codebase during the integration into Google, the early engineers created a specialized permission set called “OldTuber”. OldTuber granted you the ability to completely bypass the new Google-oriented code enforcement policies, enabling anyone holding it to commit code directly to the YouTube codebase, with only the most glancing of code reviews from anyone. No need for code readability. No need for exhaustive tests. No need for maintaining code coverage. If you broke the site by improperly wielding OldTuber status, it was on your head and you would lose the privilege immediately, if not your job. So you just had to be a good citizen and never break the site.
Oh man. At our org, we called this "being a cowboy." We have a lot of process to prevent cowboys now. Oh, the good ol' days haha.
by kstrauser on 5/1/19, 6:09 PM
You did God's work, son. As a bitter veteran of the browser wars, thank you.
by Iv on 5/2/19, 3:07 AM
And this is how you hack organizations:
"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."
by stiGGG on 5/1/19, 9:50 PM
I remember that day this banner showed up. My team at the company I was working for at that time was trying to do bleeding edge web development and we desperately tried to convince management to drop IE6 support too. This helped a lot. It’s amazing to read this story and I only can say thank you OldYoutubers!
by LocalPCGuy on 5/1/19, 6:13 PM
I remember using those banners are reasons to not support IE6 in our client projects at the time. It took a bit longer for it to actually fade away for us, but it's great to hear the story behind those banners.
by maxxxxx on 5/1/19, 6:15 PM
There is another thread about a Code of Ethics for developers. This is an interesting case study. In many ways what they did was unethical but the result was probably positive overall. How do you deal with that? Ethics is hard and very dependent on the details of the situation.
by oxguy3 on 5/1/19, 6:10 PM
They risked their jobs for the greater good. Absolute heroes.
by timw4mail on 5/1/19, 6:15 PM
IE 6 rightfully deserved this. However, the modern policy of supporting only the latest browsers can also be too extreme.
Web browsers have gotten to be MUCH more resource intensive than the IE6 days. Try loading any "modern" site on a "modern" browser on a netbook. (Or any computer with an Atom processor).
While its "compatibility" has waned, I really appreciate Opera 12 for its performance on humble machines. No modern browser seems to match its resource usage.
by code_duck on 5/2/19, 3:20 AM
Perfect timing. For anyone not familiar from experience, personally I was doing heavy web development during this period and IE6 was a scourge - even IE7 was much better. The version was clearly beyond long in the tooth, having been released sometime like 2000 or 2001. Indeed, usage was still somewhere around 10%. If we didn’t support it, people would complain to us or even advertisers.
by hoorayimhelping on 5/1/19, 8:16 PM
>Our most renegade web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor, and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review.
I love this so much, it's so punk-rock. It's like John Henry's signature on the Declaration of Independence.
by crakenzak on 5/1/19, 6:12 PM
This is an awesome article. Thanks to this team they probably helped push the web ahead by a few years ahead vs if web developers still had to support the cripple that is IE6.
by pmarreck on 5/2/19, 6:03 PM
Good fucking riddance. I was a junior web developer during the IE5/6 days.
Microsoft, that fucking browser caused so much grief YOU LITERALLY HAVE NO IDEA unless you were there. My cursewords are barely scratching the surface of the rage. Frontend dev would literally double in work if requirements dictated IE compliance. I have no doubt that it informed both the decision of many devs to head to the backend and stay there (like I did) as well as Material Design from Google which is not nearly so dependent on spacing being rendered precisely.
by forgotmypw3 on 5/1/19, 7:10 PM
Yes, IE quirks were hard to deal with, especially when making complex designs.
However, this is setting a precedent for restricting websites to certain "acceptable" clients, which is not a good direction.
by Nokinside on 5/2/19, 6:08 AM
They should get a medal.
Microsoft was way behind in the Web era and IE6 was attempt to slow everybody else down and create web that works only with MS software.
The IE6 was prime example of the Microsoft strategy of embrace and extend using market share. They build software that included harmful features, broke standard or for no reason and had intentional inconsistencies.
Microsoft was pure "engineering evil" during the Gates era.
by beaker52 on 5/2/19, 2:00 PM
I'm a bit salty about this - I've proposed the "dropping ie6 banner without actually dropping support" banner at multiple jobs in the past. Each time it was met with "ooooh we can't do that" by product. I didn't have the guts to just go ahead and do it.
On a related note, I feel like most of my career has been spent preaching things that I should have just asked for forgiveness for. I can't count the number of times I've heard "we want x, but we can't do anything to achieve x". Psssst, you can - you just need to do it. Scared of change/ the unforseen. If you don't know what the ramifications are going to be, there could be positive ones you're missing too. Try it. If it's truly sinking your ship, kill it. Otherwise sail off into the promised land. Rinse and repeat. Be brave. That's my advice.
by systematical on 5/2/19, 7:55 AM
We all killed IE6 eventually, the big shops and the little shops. Big shops had their banners, us little ones had their banter. Telling those in accounting, marketing, support, and sales to use FireFox, Chrome, or whatever instead of IE6 so we didn't have to #%$& with debugging IE6 on extranets.
Man those were rough days.
by dreamcompiler on 5/1/19, 7:53 PM
On behalf of the entire Internet-using world, thank you.
by joshe on 5/1/19, 6:41 PM
Ah the good old days, I too remember accidentally crashing ie6 computers WITH CSS.
by jitbit on 5/3/19, 9:05 PM
I remember showing this banner to our boss saying "hey, we should do that too, look EVEN GOOGLE DOES THAT" at the company I worked back then.
And we did.
by anon87345 on 5/1/19, 10:00 PM
```
  OldTuber granted you the ability 
  to completely bypass the new 
  Google-oriented code enforcement 
  policies, enabling anyone 
  holding it to commit code 
  directly to the YouTube 
  codebase, with only the most 
  glancing of code reviews from 
  anyone. No need for code 
  readability. No need for 
  exhaustive tests. No need for 
  maintaining code coverage. If 
  you broke the site by improperly 
  wielding OldTuber status, it was 
  on your head and you would lose 
  the privilege immediately, if 
  not your job. So you just had to 
  be a good citizen and never 
  break the site.
```
I have a secret theory from seeing this at a few companies by now; I think that it’s nearly critical to deploying complex / cloud-based stacks. There’s so much unique infrastructure to production that at some point you need a few people at least with engineering / ops expertise who can be the unblocker for getting something seeded or whatever. I’ve seen this either done explicitly or through a slow burn of acquiring grants over time which just never get revoked. But now I’m curious seeing it elsewhere if this is just a common and sort of necessary thing that happens.
by baybal2 on 5/1/19, 8:01 PM
It is 2019 and Chinese dotcoms still design for IE6. Reason? XP is still the "default OS" with megatons of hardware for things like POS terminals, fapiao printers, biometric systems, passport/rfid scanners not shipping with drivers for anything other than XP.
by navs on 5/1/19, 8:40 PM
Fascinating read. I've worked with legacy IE a lot and that often included IE6 but never came across that <img> bug. Who would have thought a missing src could do that.
I don't know why I get these warm fuzzies when reading about the Internet of yesteryear.
by Causality1 on 5/1/19, 8:36 PM
Man, that screenshot made me miss the times when the number next to a browser's name actually had some kind of meaning and jumping two integer version numbers actually meant significant differences.
by Psyonic on 5/1/19, 6:25 PM
This story is incredible. Someone with a podcast should interview you all!
by Corrado on 5/3/19, 7:34 AM
This story reminds me of the ones about the beginnings of the Apple Macintosh over on folklore.org. If you haven't been to that site you're really missing out.
by user17843 on 5/1/19, 8:24 PM
The biggest irony I see here is Microsoft being unable to gain control of their IE user base in any meaningful way.
We still see this today with the fragmentation of IE and Edge.
by olivierduval on 5/1/19, 10:30 PM
Frightening abuse of power :-(
Sorry to disagree with the current "you're my hero" trend, but in my mind, this story just show that a bunch of irresponsible hackers can do whatever they want to ease their work - for which they're paid btw - without any regard on the impacts to users that may rely on the service.
This time, it was only showing a warning message (that may have frightened some people)... and what's the next step? Decide to allow only Chrome-users to use youtube? When a company try to reach a monopoly status, it bear a social responsability.
(anyway: I'm happy for IE6 been a thing of the past)
by quickthrower2 on 5/1/19, 10:19 PM
Aside: Look how much nicer the old Youtube looks in that screenshot. That's giving me nostalgia.
by needle0 on 5/3/19, 3:12 AM
How come IE7 plunged nearly as severely at the same timing as IE6? Was the banner shown for IE7 too?
by tschellenbach on 5/1/19, 9:22 PM
Best post on HNews for this year, can we have a HNews best of the year edition? :D
by ngcc_hk on 5/2/19, 5:04 AM
Such a great story how to work, take risk and innovate in a large org.
by briznian on 5/1/19, 9:10 PM
I'm pretty sure everyone conspired to kill IE6 ten years ago.
by jokoon on 5/2/19, 7:52 AM
There must be a similar story about youtube deprecating flash...
by tuxt on 5/2/19, 4:17 AM
Thanks for doing that.
by mukundmr on 5/2/19, 7:12 AM
As a web developer, I can't thank these heroes enough.
by mschuster91 on 5/1/19, 8:30 PM
That one deserves a Balls Of Steel award. As a long time web dev, thank you for the service you have done to my life by not having to look after IE6 crap any more.
by ArtDev on 5/1/19, 10:08 PM
Epic. Thank you for your service to the web!
by gorpomon on 5/1/19, 7:38 PM
If this article had a "Buy me a beer" link I would have done that 10 times. This team has likely personally saved me 100 hours of pointless labor.
by hberg on 5/1/19, 7:01 PM
This is a great story about how company culture can get in the way of progress. Thank you "OldTubers" for getting this started!
by justplay on 5/1/19, 7:55 PM
wow. This story is one of my favorite read so far. thank you for sharing it.
by overcast on 5/1/19, 7:44 PM
Ha! Awesome story, thanks for the write up Chris! We probably shared some classes together at RIT.
by JohnFen on 5/1/19, 11:32 PM
That is awful behavior on the part of those YouTube devs. It speaks very poorly of them.
by joshdance on 5/7/19, 1:05 AM
This is amazing.
by pier25 on 5/1/19, 9:35 PM
Not all heroes wear capes. This was amazing!
by forgotAgain on 5/2/19, 1:41 PM
Thank you.
by Iv on 5/2/19, 3:01 AM
Just one word: Thanks!
by ronilan on 5/1/19, 6:18 PM
The press article mentioned is this: https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-ki... news obtained via reader’s tip as was common back then.
Those where indeed interesting times at both TechCrunch and YouTube, but...
“Glory days well they'll pass you by; Glory days in the wink of a young girl's eye; Glory days, glory days”
by sonnyblarney on 5/1/19, 7:51 PM
It would be a funny thing were it not for the fact that we have a massive company doing blatantly anti-competitive things.
If the Feds every want to try to break up G, this will be submitted as evidence.
Edit: this is exactly what a monopolizer looks like in action. One tactical move at a time, until they have full control of an adjacent layer in the value chain. In this case browsers.
by samgranieri on 5/1/19, 9:26 PM
Bravo!
by throwaway66666 on 5/1/19, 8:38 PM
EDIT: I misunderstood the article. Nothing to see here.
by SeanAnderson on 5/1/19, 6:10 PM
This was a really great read. Thanks for sharing and thanks for putting the nail in the IE6 coffin.
by pjmlp on 5/1/19, 6:18 PM
Incredible how everyone is rejoicing with this story.
Enjoy your new Chrome master.
by behringer on 5/1/19, 6:21 PM
Wow is this ancient history already? At the time is was regarded as completely retarded because nobody used IE6 except grandmas and corporations. So youtube telling us to use IE6 was silly. On top of that, many websites took the popup and made it so you couldn't actually see their content under any circumstances. Those sites simply got ignored by literally everyone on a corporate browser.
Largely it was a waste of time but it did pique the media's interest.